Psychic elephants and evolutionary psychology

Peter Foster, a columnist for the National Post in Canada, wrote what I think is a very insightful piece on a question that’s bedeviled me for many years, in “Why Climate Change is a Moral Crusade in Search of a Scientific Theory.” I have never seen a piece of such quality published on My compliments to them. It has its problems, but there is some excellent stuff to chew on, if you can ignore the gristle. The only ways I think I would have tried to improve on what he wrote is, one, to go deeper into the identification of the philosophies that are used to “justify the elephantine motivations.” As it is, Foster uses readily identifiable political labels, “liberal,” “left,” etc. as identifiers. This will please some, and piss off others. I really admired Allan Bloom’s efforts to get beyond these labels to understanding and identifying the philosophies, and the mistakes that he perceives were made with “translating” them into an American belief system that were at the root of his complaints, the philosophers who came up with them, and the consequences that have been realized through their adherents. There’s much to explore there.

Foster also “trips” over an analogy that doesn’t really apply to his argument (though he thinks it does) in his reference to supposed motivations for thinking Earth was the center of the Universe, though aspects of the stubbornness of pre-Copernican thinking on it, to which he also refers, apply.

He says a lot in this piece, and it’s difficult to fully grasp it without taking some time to think about what he’s saying. I will try to make your thinking a little easier.

He begins with trying to understand the reasons for, and the motivational consequences of, economic illiteracy in our society. He uses a notion of evolutionary psychology (perhaps from David Henderson, to whom he refers), that our brains have been in part evolutionally influenced by hundreds of thousands of years (perhaps millions. Who knows how far back it goes) of tribal society, that our natural perceptions of human relations, regarding power and wealth, and what is owed as a consequence of social status, are influenced by our evolutionary past.

Here is a brief video from Reason TV on the field of evolutionary psychology, just to get some background.

Edit 2/16/2016: I’ve added 3 more paragraphs relating to another video I’m adding, since it relates more specifically to this topic.

The video, below, is intriguing, but I can’t help but wonder if the two researchers, Cosmides and Tooby, are reading current issues they’re hearing about in political discourse into “stone age thinking” unjustifiably, because how do we know what stone age thinking was? I have to admit, I have no background in anthropology or archaeology at this point. I might need that to give more weight to this inference. The topic they discuss here, about a common misunderstanding of market economics, relates back to something they discussed in the above video, about humans trying to detect and form coalitions, and how market mechanisms have the effect of appearing to interfere with coalition-building strategies. They say this leads to resentment against the market system.

What this would seem to suggest is that the idea that humans are drastically changing our planet’s climate system for the worst is a nice salve for that desire for coalition building, because it leads one to a much larger inference that market economics (the perceived enemy of coalition strategies) is a problem that transcends national boundaries. The constant mantra of warmists that, “We must act now to solve it,” appears to demand a coalition, which to those who feel disconnected by markets feels very desirable.

One of the most frequent desires I’ve heard from those who believe that we are changing our climate for the worst is that they only want to deal with market participants, “Who care about me and my community.” What Cosmides and Tooby say is this relates back to our innate desire to build coalitions, and is evidence that these people feel that the market system is interfering, or not cooperating in that process. What they say, as Foster says, is this reflects a lack of understanding of market economics, and a total ignorance of the benefits its effects bring to humanity.

Foster says that our modern political and economic system, which frustrates tribalism, has only been a brief blink of an eye in our evolutionary experience, by comparison. So we still carry an evolutionary heritage that forms our perceptions of fairness and social survival, and it emerges naturally in our perceptions of our modern systems. He says this argument is controversial, but he justifies using it by saying that there is an apparent pattern to the consequences of economic illiteracy. He notices a certain consistency in the arguments that are used to morally challenge our modern systems, which does not seem to be dependent on how skilled people are in their niche areas of knowledge, or unskilled in many areas of knowledge. It’s important to keep what he says about this in mind throughout the article, even though he goes on at length into other areas of research, because it ties in in an important way, though he does not refer back to it.

He doesn’t say this, but I will. At this point, I think that the only counter to the natural tendencies we have (regardless of whether Foster describes them accurately or not) is an education in the full panoply in the outlooks that formed our modern society, and an understanding of how they have advanced since their formation. In our recent economy, there’s a tendency to think about narrowing the scope of education towards specialties, since each field is so complex, and takes a long time to master, but that will not do. If people don’t get the opportunity to explore, or at least experience, these powerful ways of understanding the world, then the natural tendency towards a “low-pass filter” will dominate what one sees, and our society will have difficulty advancing, and may regress. A key phrase Foster uses is, “Believing is seeing.” We think we see with our eyes, but we actually see with our beliefs (or, in scientific terms, our mental models). So it is crucial to be conscious of our beliefs, and be capable of examining and questioning them. Philosophy plays a part in “exercising” and developing this ability, but I think this really gets into the motivation to understand the scientific outlook, because this is truly what it’s about.

A second significant area Foster explores is a notion of moral psychology from Jonathan Haidt, who talks about “subconscious elephants,” which are “driving us,” unseen. We justify our actions using moral language, giving the illusion that we understand our motivations, but we really don’t. Our pronouncements are more like PR statements, convincing others that our motivations are good, and should be allowed to move forward, unrestricted. However, without examining and understanding our motivations, and their consequences, we can’t really know whether they are good or not. Understanding this, we should be cautious about giving anyone too much power–power to use money, and power to use force–especially when they appeal to our moral sensibility to give it to them.

Central to Foster’s argument is that “climate change” is a moral crusade, a moral argument–not a scientific one, that uses the authority that our society gives to science to push aside skepticism and caution regarding the actions in “climate policy” that are taken in its name.

Foster excuses the people who promote the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as fact, saying they are not frauds who are consciously deceiving the public. They are riding pernicious, very large, “elephants,” and they are not conscious of what is driving them. They are convinced of their own moral rightness, and they are honest, at least, in that belief. That should not, however, excuse their demands for more and more power.

I do not mean what I say here to be a summary of Foster’s article. I encourage you to read it. I only mean to make the complexity of what he said a bit more understandable.

Related posts: Foster’s argument has made me re-examine a bit what I said in the section on Carl Sagan in “The dangerous brew of politics, religion, technology, and the good name of science.”

I’m taking a flying leap with this, but I have a suspicion my post called “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind,” exploring what Ayn Rand said in her novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” perhaps gets into describing Haidt’s “motivational elephants.”