I sometimes imagine that an ethical system I don’t understand imposes no demands on me. But this is not right. It does impose, at the very least, the demand that I understand the system and determine if it makes any plausible claims.

Imaginary virtue

The noble hero who renounces profit in the pursuit of humanitarian aims, a common theme in movies and television programs, stands in stark contrast to a reality in which the producers and distributors of these very same programs are motivated entirely by the pursuit of profit. The theme of altruism is one technical apparatus among many used in an industry which, like every other industry, has profit as its raison d'être. Advocates of motives higher than accumulation of mammon are always met with nodding assent to their noble principles, followed immediately by a return to a reality in which they have no place. We have effectively contained and neutralized the threat morality poses to the hegemony of commerce, by bringing it to life in a fictional world, hermetically isolated from a real world in which pursuit of profit is universal.

"Spooky words"A letter to a reductionist

A friend has been heavily influenced by those reductionists who seem eager to rid our culture not only of superstition, but of all words that don't refer directly to a measurable, observable quantity. Whenever I use words like "truth," "virtue," "reason" and "God," he interrupts me and demands I desist from using such "spooky words." I thought my response might be of wider interest.

I assume what the idea of “spooky words” means to you is “words that don't refer to anything measurable and quantifiable, anything whose existence or nonexistence can be ascertained in a reproducible manner,” or something like that. The problem is, at least at the present state of technological development, there's no way to measure or quantify the mental state of another person. When someone reports to you that he is angry, anxious, ashamed, disgusted, depressed, frightened, guilty, happy, hopeful, frustrated, lonely, sad, bored, excited, etc., your response must be “I will have to ignore that spooky word you just said because I don’t have any evidence to back it up.”

Words like these are spooky because the qualities they describe are not measurable, and not even easily defined. But do you have a way of characterizing mental states that is more exact? Of course we should strive for the greatest level of precision we can achieve, but if we can't achieve perfect precision, should we give up the fight, and just remain completely mute about the mental aspects of human experience?

If the state of the physical world is all that matters to you, and the mental state of human beings is essentially irrelevant, then you would be perfectly justified in limiting yourself to a vocabulary that excludes any spooky words. If mental states are important to you, however, then, since they are difficult to describe to begin with, it seems to me you shouldn't rule out any of the resources available in describing them, no matter how metaphorical and inexact they are.

If I care about understanding someone's mental state, and he starts getting poetic, it seems to me I should still listen carefully to him, and use his words as evidence to try to understand his mental state. Since glimpsing the mental state of another is such a difficult thing, I should not discard any evidence, no matter how tenuous.

How well we get along with others depends in large part on how good we are at understanding them, which means building mental models of them. In some situations, where the interaction is not of profound importance, you will need only a simple model. But for important interactions, it is worth building a more sophisticated model. This model, to be adequate, surely has to include some aspects of personality that do not lend themselves to easy categorization and quantification, aspects that can probably only be described with spooky words. It also has to include a catalog of beliefs that we disagree with.

Even if you were to find a way to build a more quantitative model of human emotions, much of the data you use in developing your model will come from the vocabulary the other person uses to describe himself. If he uses spooky words, and you merely ignore them, you are sacrificing useful data that might have been used to improve your model.

In addition to the spooky words we use to describe our own mental states, there's another whole set of spooky words used to describe one person’s effect on another person’s mental state: amiable, impressive, offensive, rude, polite, intrusive, contentious, belligerent, and so forth. These we also ignore at our peril. How can we avoid being rude if we see “rude” as a spooky word, and disregard all the data about what aspects of our own behavior others perceive as rude?

When I hear someone talk about astrology, my first reaction is to launch into a lecture about confirmation bias and the advantages of Baconian science. This isn't always the best response, however. There are some circumstances where it makes more sense to try to understand what the person is trying to tell me, even though I disagree with him.

I would ask you: how do you propose to continue improving your skills in human interaction over the course of your lifetime, if the vocabulary used to express ideas about human interaction is off-limits to you on account of its lack of precision?

I can understand the desire for precision. But achieving greater precision often requires that we begin with whatever level of precision we have, and try to improve upon it. I suspect you use a lot of imprecise words to describe your social interactions, and I suspect you have a lot of skill in using these words. If you hold yourself back from using this vocabulary, isn’t this going to hold you back from developing greater skill and precision in using it? Einsteinian mechanics doesn't discard the vocabulary of Newtonian mechanics. It uses that vocabulary in a more precise way.

If precise thinking carries a very high weight in your own personal objective function, and the weight of social and commercial success is negligible, then it might make sense to just avoid all the imprecise reasoning about human interaction. But I doubt this is the case.

Human beings differ from other organisms in that, in addition to the message passed from generation to generation in nucleic acids, there's also a message passed from generation to generation in words. To understand the behavior of a human being, we need to understand this legacy of words—his “memome,” as it is often called—as well as his genome.

Just as, in order to understand the diversity of the genetic composition of different organisms, we must understand how these are related to one another, make conjectures about common ancestors, and look for these in the fossil record, so also, in order to understand the diversity of human beliefs, we must understand how these are related to one another, make conjectures about common ancestors, and look for these in historical texts, the fossil record of ideas.

The person who takes no interest in the origin and evolution of the ideas used by his society, or who would like to imagine their origins are different from what the evidence shows, is analogous to that sort of person—whom I know you dislike—who takes no interest in the biological origins of man, or imagines these origins are different from what the evidence shows.

The idea that the contemporary scientific view of man and nature is something entirely new, or has evolved from earlier views in a narrow path of continuous progress, is no more scientific than the idea that contemporary animal species all derive from a small subset of animals that was rescued on an ark. There was no flood that eliminated the other forms of culture and left only science.

We would like to imagine that, even if other ideas derive from a path of historical evolution, our own ideas are pure and pristine, deriving from a cold, dispassionate reason uncontaminated by the errors of the past. But the scientific project of understanding and manipulating nature has its historical origins just as much as religions do.

Those who are most eager in the pursuit of the scientific project have a tendency to treat those who don't share their goals as somehow less than human. It is almost as if they believe that, when we trace the memetic origins of the race of scientists, we will find it is pure and free of tainted blood, and the memetic origins of the other memetic races are tainted, and therefore inferior.

In my experience, an extended philosophical discussion with a superstitious person will almost always show that, insofar as he has a coherent philosophy at all, it doesn't include the requirement that his ideas correspond to reality. To ask him to make his ideas correspond to reality makes no more sense than to ask him to dye his hair blond so as to look like the master race. (Here it is a master memetic race in question rather than a master genetic race, but does that make it any better?) Of course, the superstitious person may say his ideas correspond to reality, but when you probe more deeply into what he means by “reality,” you will find he means “a reality that's comfortable to me,” not the same reality as that of the scientist.

The project of precisely predicting and controlling nature is one among many human projects. It is hard to imagine how we might say it is a “better” one. What the basis of comparison should be is precisely the issue in question. From the point of view of a poet or a novelist, the scientific project might be seen as merely a refuge for those with paltry imaginations.

My question is, if you're really committed to the scientific project, to seeking to understand rather than to judge, why aren't you applying this objectivity in the realm of human ideas as well as in other realms? Shouldn’t all your descriptions of other ideas and belief systems be morally neutral, just as your descriptions of nature are morally neutral? (For example, shouldn’t you say “not empirically based” rather than “spooky”?)

In many cases I can look at my fellow human beings as partners in the search for truth, partners in the quest for prosperity, or partners in any activity I deem important. In such cases, the other person becomes, in a sense, merely an extension of my own mind. We can “think together” to try to reach a solution to a problem, because we agree on the definition of the problem and what might count as a solution. But this isn't always the case. When someone has goals very different from my own, our relationship changes. He becomes an object to study scientifically, rather than a co-participant in the scientific project. Since no one shares precisely the same goals, people will be perpetually switching back and forth between these two categories. One of the marks of competence in social interaction is to manage these shifts between agreement and disagreement in a manner that doesn't get me agitated, and that doesn't get the other person agitated or offended.

I have a tendency to get angry when another person refuses to be a co-participant in whatever my project of the moment is, and to lash out at him, criticizing him, trying to get him to fall back into line. In my experience, this hasn't worked out very well.

Two people can have different views and not be a threat to one another. I think that in my particular case, growing up in an environment in which someone who had different views about the acceptability of homosexuality actually could be a serious threat to me, I developed to an unhealthy, overly defensive, way of handling disagreement. Now, when someone disagrees with me, as the very first step in dealing with disagreement, I try to assure myself that the disagreement is not a threat to me.

You said you see poetry and beauty in the sheer complexity and order of the natural universe. I wonder, do you also see poetry and beauty in the human universe, in the diversity of beliefs and goals that constitute our human world?

The estate of reason

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel.
Emerson

Emerson’s noble vision of a broad, open plain of reason, without walls, fences or borders contrasts sharply with the reason of our era. Today we can traverse only a minute distance in the estate of reason before we come upon one of many insuperable fortified walls erected between disciplines. The historian admits he has not studied physics, not ruing his timidity with a downcast eye, but proclaiming his provincialism with the haughty air of a Pharisee who proudly respects boundaries and follows rules. A free spirit like Emerson who imagines himself a freeman of the whole estate will today find himself contemptuously dismissed as a dilettante. In the estate of reason there are no longer freemen. Each mind is sold to one or another plantation, destined to a lifetime of servitude on its tiny plot.