As
2014 draws to a close, I look at some of the ideas that aroused my curiosity, challenged existing beliefs, and inspired awe this year.
Moral Progress
The
predominant theme that piqued my interest this year is the field of ‘Moral Psychology’. From
ideas of self-identity, to empathy, to the evolution of morality and lot else, the
field opened me to a new world of ideas on the foundations of our moral lives.
• Ancient
Greeks and Romans are the earliest champions of the cause of political liberty
and equality at their home (if not abroad). They debated, argued and
philosophized on issues of citizenry, rights, equality, etc. Despite this prevalent
intellectual tradition, slavery was commonplace in ancient Greece & Rome. Fast
forward to the 19th century. John Stuart Mill, the influential British
philosopher and economist, argued for radical political ideas like: individual
liberty, abolition of slavery, equality of women, etc. In stark contrast to his
other views, he was deeply racist and prejudiced in the sense that he favored
colonialism in countries like India, where he believed the inhabitants to be
barbaric and not capable of self-rule. What explains these paradoxes? "Ancient
Greeks did not see slavery as a case of injustice. Rather, justice arose as a
question only among those who were not slaves" (Lane, 2014).
Similarly, JS Mill’s support of a retrograde idea like ‘benevolent despotism’ shows
the possibility of fallibility of thought even among progressive people. The
two cases also illuminate that ideas of morality are not static or etched in
stone. Views that are deeply held and considered as moral today might be looked
down by people in the future as "immoral, prejudiced, simplistic, and misguided.
And they might even be right about it."
• How then
does civilization achieve Moral progress, if even the smartest among us are fallible
to poor logic and parochialism? Should empathy be our primary instrument to achieve
moral progress? Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein (in their 2012
TED presentation) deconstruct the better of angel of our nature that causes
moral progress, thus:
“Empathy is a feeble instrument for making moral progress. For one thing, it's innately biased toward blood relations, babies and warm, fuzzy animals. As far as empathy is concerned, ugly outsiders can go to hell…Reason has
muscle.
It's reason that provides
the push to widen
that circle of empathy….
Contradictions bother us, at
least when we're forced to confront them, which
is just another way of saying that we are susceptible to reason. And
if you look at the history of moral progress, you
can trace a direct pathway from reasoned arguments to
changes in the way that we actually feel. Time
and again, a thinker would lay out an argument as to
why some practice was indefensible, irrational, and inconsistent with values already
held. Their essay would go viral, get
translated into many languages, get debated at pubs and coffee houses and salons, and
at dinner parties, and influence leaders, legislators, popular
opinion. Eventually their conclusions get absorbed into
the common sense of decency, erasing the tracks of the original argument that
had gotten us there.”
Scarcity
Another
idea that captivated me recently is the use of behavioral economics to
understand why poor people stay poor. There is a tendency to attribute poverty
to people’s choices or their personalities, and not see it as a consequence of
the circumstances they live in. In the context of inequality, Dr. Kaushik Basu (Chief Economist, World Bank) remarked
recently that: “there can be no distinction on
the lines of hard-working babies and lazy babies”. Sendhil Mullainathan &
Eldar Shafir (Professors at Harvard & Princeton University respectively) in
their book “Scarcity” explain the reason why
poor people stay poor. They deploy the notion of scarce ‘mental bandwidth’ as
the primary reason why poor people (and most of us) make bad choices. They
argue that scarcity “makes us dumber” (i.e. it lowers IQ points) and consequently makes us bad decision makers. Poor people,
therefore, are not inherently dumb, immoral or demotivated. Rather, their
constant pursuit to make ends meet constrains their bandwidth to reason through
other choices in their life. The life-critical choices being: sending kids to school, borrowing money
from a moneylender, buying fertilizers, etc.
This
idea is humbling because people with abundance are fortunate, in a sense,
to be part of a familial or cultural system that grants them sufficient
mental bandwidth to make the right choices and design better lives.
Identity
I
have always found it puzzling as to how people perceive intuitively the notion
of identity, both as self and other. Further, lacing identity with the notion of morality adds a new layer of complexity. From selling iPads, to detergents, to movies,
to communal violence, identity is a potent ingredient. Let me consider two questions around identity: Are our self-identities static as most of us tend to
believe? What is fundamental to the notion of self – is it memories as we
commonly tend to believe?
• I have long held this view that people don’t change. The
idea was comforting, for it grants a strange sense of authenticity to who we
are. But, as I recently discovered, I was wrong! Dan Gilbert (Professor Psychology,
Harvard), based on his research, argues
that people vastly underestimate how much their values, personalities and
preferences change over time. He attributes this tendency to underestimate
change, more as our inability to imagine our future-self than the unlikelihood
of change actually happening.
• If we are all so
susceptible to change, then what is it that remains fundamental to who we are? In
other words, what is the substrate of our identity? Most of us tend to think
that memories fundamentally constitute who we are and stripped of them, we
would lose our sense of self. But Nina Strohminger (Psychologist at Duke University) makes an interesting
argument, dispelling these popular notions:
“If
people have an essence that lends them their identity, memory might not be the
most promising candidate… The single most important mental trait in judging
self-identity is one’s deeply held moral convictions. We are not only concerned
with moral character when constructing an identity for others, but when doing
so for ourselves.”
Identity, as she argues, is an
evolutionary design which helps us distinguish members of a society. Why would
we need to do distinguish members of a society in the first place? To perpetuate
shared values and humanity, “for reciprocal altruism and punishment”. Therefore,
“It’s
not that identity is centered around morality. It’s that morality necessitates
the concept of identity, breathes life into it, provides its raison d’être. If we had no scruples,
we’d have precious little need for identities.”
Sociological Imagination
The idea of “Sociological
Imagination” proposed by C. Wright Mills (in 1959), is another fascinating
work that I stumbled across this year. Mills provides an excellent framework
for conducting social analysis & understanding social outcomes. The
sociological imagination, says Mills, insists on understanding people in
terms of the intersection of their own lives (their biographies) and their
larger social and historical context (in history). He also exhorts us to see
the interconnections between personal ‘troubles’ and public ‘issues’ to really
understand the underlying the structural problem plaguing the society. For example,
he takes the case of marriage and argues thus:
“Inside a marriage a man and a woman may
experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four
years of marriage is 850 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of
a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the
family and other institutions that bear upon them… In so far as the family as
an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief
providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage
remains incapable of purely private solution.”
