So that's what happens: you keep postponing getting started on your next project, so by the time you get on it, it has already transformed beyond recognition. What I wanted to write originally was a follow-up to my more personal observations on Mattias Desmet and his idea that mass formation is a mechanism that explains a number of the social phenomena that we have witnessed over the past decade, a fortiori the past two to three years. His theories about the mind suffering from free-floating anxiety that wanders aimlessly until it can latch on to a focal point for all its fears and insecurity not only had resonated strongly with me as I tried to understand what mysterious behavior was becoming the norm in society. At the same time, I thought I was able to draw on some parallels with my own (subject of) study. I am writing my dissertation on Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), and though this man is more generally known for his Fable of the Bees in which he the cynically defends the commercial society that was taking shape in his day, he originally was a medical doctor. One of his less-known works is a dialogue between a doctor and his patient who suffers from hypochondria. As 'the hypo' had formerly been understood as a physical ailment, Mandeville - describing the particular interplay between the stomach (formerly understood as the seat of the soul) and the brain - stood at the crossroads of a rerouting of Western philosophy which involved the juggling of the animal and the divine, the physical and the intellectual, creating space for a scientific description of man's mind, while sacrificing his soul. You can read my essay, The Endemic Hypo, here.
It had become clear to me - as it had to many who were not impressed, let alone swept away by the many instances of ritual behavior in post-'rona society - that ideas alone were insufficient to explain a lot of the behavior that was proliferating. For clarity, I am not solely referring to the religious wearing of splash shields to protect against an airborne virus. Or to the wind sections of the orchestras that meekly resumed their playing, their instruments held to their mouths through the cutouts in their masks. Another stark example was the prohibition of exercise and fresh air in many places, indicating that 'health concerns' are not necessarily related to health as traditionally understood. More specifically to my mind comes the deployment of the accusation of 'denialism' to preemptively eliminate the challenger from any debate. And how about cancel culture? Have all these elements not been suggesting that a type of intellectual fatigue is pervading culture, a disease with ideas and their examination in mutual exchanges. As should be clear from the previous paragraph, the history of ideas is my original field of study. So even as I felt that (mass-)psychology had explanations to offer for the extreme in-group/out-group behavior we were seeing, it was with some reserve I listened to conversations such as the one between Brett Weinstein and Mattias Desmet, as I was waiting to receive my copy of the latter's The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Between Weinstein's evolutionary perspective and Desmet's developmental psychology, I found it difficult to see the role attributed to - or left for - our intellectual side, if that's all it is. After all, is not our very act of articulating thoughts a manifestation of our belief that they matter? As far as I understand, Desmet sees us as fundamentally struggling with semantic meaning, as there is no word that can complete our comprehension. The resulting insecurity is social. And as we fail to develop meaningful social bonds, redemption can eventually be found by merging in the nameless crowd. (Obviously, any misrepresentations of his ideas are my responsibility entirely. And though I do not agree with him on everything, he does ask the essential questions, which is a precondition for getting us out of this mess.)
To be specific, a point of disagreement for me is that I have come to consider insecurity and meaning essential actors in our troubled culture in a different manner. In short, our ability to know and understand implies a need to know and understand. We need meaning, in the teleological sense. A secularized understanding of the world easily bumps up against a lack of meaning. The secularized understanding, on the other hand, may have increased our control over our circumstances, but an ever-increasing control and security also lowers our threshold for the toleration of the insecure, and the incontrollable. I called this unfortunate outcome of this hazard bias of ours 'mental obesity', in reference to our in-built urge to stack up calories when we can with the well-known consequences in times of affluence. I wrote about this here and here. In other words, I understand man as, by his nature, having more needs in the intellectual sphere than does Desmet. Of course: this is what I could have expected when seeking confrontation with a field of study different from my own. Obviously, I was not fully convinced of his perspective or mine, and so I had more reading to do.
I had a brief moment's expectation while going through Jordan Peterson's Beyond Order. Unfortunately, his reference to our 'instinct for meaning' remained just that: a loose reference. But I had more psychologists on the menu, one of whom proved to be stimulating both in topicality and from a (pre-)historical perspective. I had read Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's Coddling of the American Mind already. In it, they describe how cultural, commercial/administrative, technological, and pedagogical developments in the US have led to an escalation in feelings of anxiety and unsafety among the young, especially in girls. They attributed a particular role in inaugurating this hell to social media, in particular to the introduction of the 'like' and the 'retweet', manifestations - for the world to see! - of social approval or disapproval.
But it was while reading a previous work of Jonathan Haidt's that I wondered whether he wasn't on to something way more sinister - way more sinister than a nice and likeable guy like Haidt might think of. The book I am referring to is The Righteous Mind, in which Haidt investigates the question addressed by philosophers at least as far back as Plato: is our moral judgment based on intellectual deliberation or on intuition? Haidt's answer to this question is probably best summarized by the metaphor he uses to describe how he believes we humans engage in moral decision making: the rider on the elephant.
Seated on top of a bulk of immediate emotive responses, our rational faculty - the rider - can only hope to nudge the direction and weight of judgment ever so slightly, so Haidt's theory goes. And most of the time, the rider is just behaving like the press office for steps already taken without his involvement. The other metaphor Haidt uses with great descriptive effect is that of the 'moral palate'. Having hypothesized that we are pre-wired to develop a series of moral adjudications during childhood - without the intervention of inculcating adults - he goes on to define the spectra of moral questions these supposed intuitions rule on. These 'foundations', as Haidt calls them, can be linked to the evolutionary purpose they grew from. He identifies the following: care/harm (based on the necessity to care for and protect offspring), fairness/cheating (further specified as 'proportionality', based on enabling cooperation while avoiding being duped by opportunistic exploiters), loyalty/betrayal (based on the necessity to form and maintain cohesive, collaborative groups), authority/subversion (based on the necessity to maintain certain hierarchical relationships within the group), and sanctity/degradation (based originally on the so-called 'omnivore's dilemma', the necessity of exploring new foods with caution, adapted more broadly to life surrounded by germs and parasites). He adds the liberty/oppression foundation when it becomes clear that in current perception, the fairness spectrum is open to contrasting interpretations, as is clearly evinced by the different understanding the political Right and Left have of 'fairness', that is, whether it is a proportional concept (which explains the addition to the above foundation of fairness/cheating) or one related to outcomes and absolute situations. Indeed, one of the more intriguing aspects of Haidt's work is that he suggests a way to interpret political positions and affiliation with reference to how strongly these respective foundations are developed and felt in various individuals. But before I address the relevance of this perspective for the questions I opened this essay with, let me try to vindicate my own professional perspective once more. (For the sake of clarity and correctness, let me state once more that any possible misrepresentation of the author's ideas is my fault and responsibility entirely.)
As a matter of fact, Haidt himself introduces his own theory with an overview of those of his predecessors - philosophers, not psychologists - who had tackled the question of moral deliberation versus intuition as well. An intriguing section of this narrative is dedicated to philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant. Haidt notes that their rationalistic approach to moral issues can be linked to the evidence we have of their respective personalities. As 'high systemizers' and 'low empathizers', both can be assumed to have occupied an extreme point on the spectrum of autistic personality traits. Inversely, those of us who do have some more empathic capacity can imagine the theory being somewhat affected by the personality. True enthusiasm is manifested by Haidt when he can discuss David Hume. The Scotsman believed in the primacy of the emotions over reason and developed a theory of society that rested on the mutual disciplining of individuals so inclined, over time leading to a political order that was not an intellectual construct of any kind, let alone the fruit of a social contract. The social dimension of morality is fairly clear in Haidt's work but grows more explicit as he discusses the evolutionary processes that may explain group mechanisms, specifically the role selection as between groups may have played in our history as a species and in the constitution of our pre-wiring.
Alas, Haidt seems unaware of the influence Bernard Mandeville had on Hume. It was Mandeville who had shocked Augustan polite society in the first three decades of the eighteenth century with a series of essays in which he posited that - regardless of all the sweet and virtuous talk people may hide behind - it was our passions alone that brought us into action. But whereas Hume translated this premise into a basically optimistic and harmonious worldview, Mandeville juxtaposed his view of man with morality and did so in a subversive manner. He observed that our passions, ultimately springing from our sense of self-preservation, actually promoted our material wellbeing, but did so at the cost of personal morality. Thus, his famous motto 'private vices, public benefits' was born. This is not the place to argue whether or not this meant that he (ever so cynically) defended commercial society as it was taking shape around him, as received interpretation has it. Suffice it to say for now that a less equivocal motto could have made the presumed point more agreeably and thus convincingly. The irony of the situation was that Hume would go on to use Mandeville's understanding of human psychology and combine it with the toolbox of the Earl of Shaftesbury - whom Mandeville had severely criticized - who had suggested we were in possession of a 'moral sense' that made us harmonious elements in a benevolent universe. The irresolvable clash between flesh and soul, between passionate, physical instincts and a mind striving after virtuous conduct had no place in either Shaftesbury's or Hume's world. The implications of Hume's perspective for social and political philosophy were that human institutions would be based, historically and ideally, upon a natural benevolence towards our fellows.
This choice of basic outlook on our nature - the benevolence hinted at above versus the Hobbesian homo homini lupus est, meaning that we necessarily are enemies to one another - decides many, if not all of the options we hold possible in the political realm. Of course, we can try to circumvent morality - which is what Mandeville did in an age way less prepared for this - the way evolutionary psychology does and try to decipher in retrospect (and not progressively, as does history) what traits and tendencies have survived in us and figure out what role these must have played in the survival of the species. In other words: how did these traits help our ancestors outcompete those with other traits. Which is what postulating the moral foundations I listed above is an exercise in. And this is where I thought Haidt's hypothesis acquired acute relevance for our experience of the past few years. Again, his lack of familiarity with Mandeville is evident - though it does not have substantive relevance in this case - when he focuses on inter-group competition mechanisms and he calls us '90% chimps and 10% bees'.
I have to assume that it is Haidt's benevolent outlook that keeps him from viewing the presumed mechanism strengthening group cohesion from a more negative, or even cautionary perspective. And no, this is not - as he does correctly note - because competition between groups would have (necessarily) consisted in inter-group warfare. Survival of the fittest is not a zero-sum game. It only means that the group that is most effective at gathering food, protecting offspring, defending against predators, germs, etc. will transmit more genetic material than will others. My point is another one, incidentally one made by Mandeville by taking the beehive as the metaphor for commercial society. The beehive functions as a whole and does not count on or profit from - and cannot even tolerate - the individual judgment of worker bees or drones. The hive may be a utilitarian model, but it is also a completely collectivist one which necessarily drowns out considerations of individual moral judgment, whether based on thought or intuition. Haidt is aware of the fact that this mechanism - the 'hive switch', by which we can transform from a band of chimps into a single multi-celled organism - is easily implicated in the darker stories of humanity's past. But I find his argument on this point the weakest section of this book. Of course one can cite a rave as a paradigm example of the transcendent experience of dissolution into the group, and distinguish that from a Nazi march with its organized program and boredom in between. I get that. I also get that there is a preparatory phase before any full-flung dive into the totalitarian abyss, and that individuals generally are not groomed for this with slide shows of the Gulag or the gas chambers. What prepares people long before they effectively relinquish their own judgment is what I have called the 'benevolent face of fascism': at the start any such movement will claim it is the only one to truly care about its followers. But once the participants in a movement - the drones - have relinquished certain personal attributes, they will be ready and willing to do unspeakable things, flounting most of the 'moral foundations' on which Haidt bases his theory. Which foundation might, on the contrary, be triggered while doing the unspeakable I will be happy to pursue shortly.
First, however, I would like to ask Haidt the following. He contends that one moral foundation is prominent among the Left that distinguishes it from the Right in particular. This would be the oppression/authority spectrum: the feeling that people should not be subjected to (abuse of) power and that any individual or even better: movement, that strives after the liberation from such abuse is a worthy cause. But if people with a left-leaning political orientation indeed have strong intuitions along this spectrum, how come they have been the most obsequious in trusting the authorities over the past three years? Especially when it is evident that the authorities' recommendations have been fed by corporate interests, which is something we expect the Left to be wary of? This response was based on the care foundation, one might argue, that other foundation strongly felt on the Left? But then, why did we let the old and the vulnerable - the very group for whose benefit so many of the restrictive 'rona measures purportedly were taken - die in abysmal solitude? My goal is not to play gotcha with a scholar I appreciate and respect, but to understand a bit better.
I would have a suggestion, though, to pursue the thread of the previous paragraph. The 'sanctity/degradation foundation' is described by Haidt as the outcome of the 'omnivore's dilemma'. Having unrestricted options for nutrition is paired by the risk of trying the toxic novelty. I would - from my own background as a food writer - add the relative weakness (or inconclusiveness) of our senses to determine whether a particular food is fit for us. In any event, the reality of the risk of trying the wrong, or spoiled, food or of entertaining the wrong company with that fatal infection, while needing to explore options in times of scarcity, has inculcated a marked ambivalence regarding novelty in us. So is it our 'sanctity/degradation foundation' that - under the 'right' circumstances, say, the constant inculcation of fear - nudges people to organize their complete human universe in terms of either clean/permitted/good or dirty/prohibited/abject? Is this, perhaps, why the suggestion of a 'plague' has been so effective at precipitating us towards the edge of droneness and hivedom?
The more topical question I have, however, does not regard the moral foundations of the righteous mind, but involves the sinister matter I referred to at the start of this piece. I scratched the surface of it when I wrote the Revenge of the Nerds. It may have always been clear that social media depend on our engagement for their bottom line. But the fact that they pursue this goal by catering to the stronger emotions user-generated content may provoke - most notably anger and fear - has become evident only more recently. The secret tools of their trade are the algorithms which ensure you are offered more of the same content that provoked those strong emotions in you. For this reason, I have referred to these as 'angorithms'. In the piece I link to above, I have wondered whether the creators of these platforms perhaps are psychologically similar to the Benthams and Kants, which tendency would - in my opinion - render them least fit of any human to play with our emotions. Leaving aside the 'niceties' of the particular social straightjacket in which we place ourselves, thanks to the faculty of the 'like' and the 'retweet', and especially the social cage in which we place our girls and young women, I am nevertheless asking myself whether the problem might not be more fundamental.
We can dive a bit father back in history to find the framework for this mode of thinking. It was René Descartes, inspired by the scientific findings in his age (especially in astronomy) and the superb tool mathematics had turned out to be, who had opened a field of inquiry that sought to study man a modo geometrico, directed at identifying the universal laws capable of explaining man in the same terms that had shown to be so promising for the material world. The history of Western philosophy since, is often summarized in terms of the package deal of 'rational materialism'. Criticism of the Enlightenment, as embodying this package deal, generally is directed at this presumed couple. This is not the time to discuss how accurate this perception is. Descartes himself, for example, decidedly was not a materialist. Mandeville in his turn, profoundly influenced by Descartes (as was the Leyden medical faculty where he studied), can be described as a materialist, but certainly not as a rationalist. Both believed in the soul, still. But what happens if we transpose the modo geometrico to matters human in our day and age?
We all walk around with a supercomputer these days. And we have entrusted our social networking to platforms that can count as well as those computers. What do they count? They count and quantify our responses. Hey, these companies do need to make a buck, too, so they will have to keep you engaged. How? They will feed you more of what you responded to most strongly the last couple of times. What does strongly mean, again? Cute? That doesn't cut it, anymore. Fear and anger? How would a friend feel, or let's just say a fellow human, about feeding you these same emotions over and over? Some people would, and there's no particular way they would feel about it. They would simply keep quantifying and instrumentalizing. In Haidt's words "psychopaths reason but don't feel". Are some social media really sociopathic platforms? Â Â Â
No. I am not going to give you all the answers tonight. I will be perfectly happy to have added some pertinent questions to the pile. I will keep looking for meaning. It is not finding it, but the search that fills my soul. Obviously, if it were as simple as psychology trumping all ideas, neither Desmet nor Haidt would have spent their time composing intriguing thoughts and putting them to paper for us to read. So for now, find a fellow chimp, and feel.
I got stuck on the 2nd letter in your title... also "Socio-media"...?
...I'm glad you're concerned about the 6100,000/year(2018) Americans planning to kill themselves... triggering the law requiring testing... that 89% of psychologists refuse to obey...
"...one of the most common causes of suicide-the therapist ..."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-therapy/200901/seven-questions-david-d-burns
aka The "annual American holocaust" that everyone misses? :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)