Irresolvable Negotiable Differences of our Culture Wars

Marriage/relationship researcher John Gottman has provided us with a stunning statistic:

"69% of relationship conflict is about perpetual problems. All couples have them — these problems are grounded in the fundamental differences that any two people face. They are either fundamental differences in your personalities that repeatedly create conflict, or fundamental differences in your lifestyle needs.In our research, we concluded that instead of solving their perpetual problems, what seems to be important is whether or not a couple can establish a dialogue about them."

Gottman's research reminds me of the our nation's cultural divide; apparently, we can no longer talk with those we perceive to be different. I don't think we differ from each other nearly as much as the mass media suggests. That said, it seems to me that Gottman's suggested strategies for keeping individual relationships happy and functional are relevant to what we need to do on a national level.

We have forgotten how to talk respectfully to one another, avoiding Gottman's "four horsemen," criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness. We have forgotten that being in any functional relationship takes hard work and compromise. I believe that this difficult work has become logarithmically more difficult for two basic reasons: A) tribal ideologies running rampant and B) corporate money gushing through the political system. These two things distort the issues, cause us to create crude cartoons of one another, and permeate the national conversation with fear and loathing of each other.

Barking at each other never brings us any progress. We've seen that for years already. It will take lot of work, soul searching, and looking in the mirror to become more functional on a national level. It will take an act of faith that we can get along if only we worked harder to be civil. This is perhaps too much to ask in an age of widespread magic thinking and diminished attention spans.

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The Immorality of Fully Embracing Homo Economicus

Nick Hanauer gave a speech on the lies on which neoliberalism is built. He characterizes neoliberalism as "dependably orthogonal to the last 50,000 years of moral norms and traditions." Hanauer then turns the focus toward the foundation for neoliberalism, "homo economicus," the belief that human beings are "perfectly selfish, perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing." This unbecoming portrait of human animals dovetails with other unsubstantiated ideologies. For instance, you will often read that natural selection created a horrific dog-eat-dog world and that we are nothing more than these sorts of insatiable philistine dogs, which is nonsense, as discussed by primatologist Frans De Waal. De Waal’s main message is that we are NOT condemned by nature to treat each other badly. Though competition is part of the picture, we have evolved to be predominantly groupish and peace-loving beings who are well-tuned to look out for each other.

Now back to homo economicus. Here is an excerpt from Nick Hanauer's speech:

And how did we get to a so-called “ethics” of business that insists that the only affirmative responsibility of a corporate executive is to maximize value for shareholders?

I believe that these corrosive moral claims derive from a fundamentally flawed understanding of how market capitalism works, grounded in the dubious assumption that human beings are “homo economicus”: perfectly selfish, perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing. It is this behavioral model upon which all the other models of orthodox economics are built. And it is nonsense.

The last 40 years of research across multiple scientific disciplines has proven, with certainty, that homo economicus does not exist. Outside of economic models, this is simply not how real humans behave. Rather, Homo sapiens have evolved to be other-regarding, reciprocal, heuristic, and intuitive moral creatures. We can be selfish, yes—even cruel. But it is our highly evolved prosocial nature—our innate facility for cooperation, not competition—that has enabled our species to dominate the planet, and to build such an extraordinary—and extraordinarily complex—quality of life. Pro-sociality is our economic super power.

Hanauer sees homo economicus as a salve we invented to give ourselves permission to do terrible things;  "It is also a story we tell ourselves about ourselves that gives both permission and encouragement to some of the worst excesses of modern capitalism, and of contemporary moral and social life."

But what about capitalism? Isn't that would puts our food on our shelves. Isn't capitalism the explanation for why we strut around with our miraculous smart phones? Hanauer explains:

Capitalism is the greatest problem-solving social technology ever invented. But knowing that capitalism works is different than knowing why it works. And contrary to economic orthodoxy, it is reciprocity, not selfishness that guides it—indeed—as if by an invisible hand. It is social reciprocity that builds the high levels of trust necessary for large networks of people to cooperate at scale. And it is only through these networks of highly-cooperative specialists that the complexity that defines our modern economy can emerge.
Capitalism is good and useful, but only to an extent. More is needed for a just and prosperous society. Hanauer offers these four rules:

  • Capitalism is self-organizing, but not self-regulating. Government regulation is necessary.
  • True capitalism is not shareholder capitalism.
  • Capitalism is effective, but not efficient. Capitalism can raise our "aggregate standard of living, but it can also be extraordinarily wasteful, cruel, and unequal."
  • True capitalists are moral capitalists. "Being rapacious doesn’t make you a capitalist. It makes you an asshole and a sociopath."

For now, I'll close on this topic, but I've written often on the purported virtues of the unfettered free market, which is an ideology that I have sometimes termed the "Fourth Person in the Holy Quartet."  No doubt I'll return to this topic as homo economicus continues to destroy most of the institutions that had made the U.S. an exemplary place to live.

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George Conway Believes the President

George Conway has nailed it with this pledge to the President, including gems like these:

I believe the president wants to release his taxes but has not because he’s under audit, which is why he has fought all the way to the Supreme Court not to disclose them.

. . .

I believe former national security adviser John Bolton has no relevant testimony because he didn’t leave the White House on good terms.

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An Impeachment Trial Where the Rule of Law Got the Death Penalty

With this single question, Elizabeth Warren has precisely voiced the deep concerns of every honest and proficient trial lawyer in the United States:

At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the chief justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution?

I applaud Elizabeth Warren because this question (which is really a searing accusation) needed to be asked directly and publicly. The Emperor has no clothes. The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court is sitting on his hands in the front row seat while the Rule of Law rots. The bare-majority raucous crowd is getting its way with this modern day Pontius Pilate.

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Stinky Farts, Stinky Thoughts

The impeachment hearings offer daily fodder to those who struggle to understand how the human mind works. Many people keep expressing frustration about the lies being told by the politicians. That raises the question: Did the brain evolve as a truth-seeking organ? What if the brain's main function is survival, not truth? What if the brain's main function centers on the "Four F's": Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting and Reproduction?  What if Truth is only a fragile, occasional, happenstance by-product of the brain's main evolved function?

That brought this Scientific American article front and center: "Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are? Do we perceive reality as it is?" Here's an excerpt:

One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one's mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory . . . is garnering attention . . . Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.

Lindsey Graham is now taking the position that the Impeachment is improper because not actual crimes were committed. The Democrats then carted out Graham's 1999 video where he said the opposite.  Every human being watching this drama unfold knows all of the following with a certainty:

  1. Graham meant what he said in 1999.
  2. Graham means the opposite today.
  3. Graham won't have much trouble doing some mental gymnastics to justify both positions.
  4. If a Democrat is impeached in the near future, Graham will revert to his 1999 position.

How is it possible for Graham to justify these diametrically opposite positions? The function of the human brain is well beyond my understanding, of course.  At this time, I would simply point out that one's own farts smell OK, whereas the farts of others are unpleasant. There's actually some science on why our own farts smell OK. I would simply extrapolate: Both our farts and our own dysfunctional thoughts get free passes.  Why?  Because they are our farts and our thoughts, not those of others.  And where our entire tribe farts, that's OK too, because it's our tribe and not some other tribe. Our crappy thoughts constitute our theories, meaning that the confirmation bias kicks in like a powerful optical illusion to help us ignore conflicting evidence.

Hypocrisy is an ancient problem, of course.  It goes back at least to biblical times:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; ... You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.

This hypocrisy continues to modern times:

Morality is difficult. As [psychologist Johnathan] Haidt writes on his website, "It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups. . . . Morality binds and blinds. The metaphor [Haidt] uses to describe this idea is that we are 90 percent chimp 10 percent bee. That is to say, though we are inherently selfish, human nature is also about being what he terms "groupish."

The hypocrisy we are witnessing might be a little less distressing to the extent that we can accept the fact that the brain did not evolve for truth, but rather for assimilating resources to assist survival, utilizing the power of one's tribe whenever useful. If we can wrap our heads around this scary fact that the brain is much more geared for social power than truth, the impeachment hearings are nothing extraordinary. These hearings are merely more episodes of watching people gathered in tribes fighting for evolutionary fitness.

That said, this is an enormous and distressing price to pay in exchange for understanding.  But maybe it's . . . . true.   Maybe those moments where human minds transcend daily survival pressures to seek consistent principled truth are extraordinarily precious moments that need to be noted and celebrated.  Maybe we will never have a society based on truthful principles unless we work hard together.

Nietzsche pointed that being able to see truthfully is a moral issue. He wrote that one is truthful only to the degree that one is courageous. Maybe those fragility of those moments where people work hard and self-critically to embrace truth should remind us to appreciate what we have when politicians show the moral courage to act on principle.

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