Interspecies Love

Recently I saw a video on YouTube that shows kittens and dogs meeting for the first time.

The video is incredibly sweet, and watching these natural enemies play together made me think that humans are bringing about an incredible new thing on this planet: interspecies love and affection. Without the influence of humans, these cats and dogs would never be snuggling together for naps or playing games.

Anyone who has ever owned a pet knows that animals are loving, caring, loyal, trusting, and forgiving. But in the wild, animals can usually only share this love with members of their own species. There are the rare examples of animals caring for members of another species in the wild, but from what I can find these are usually cases where a mother has adopted an infant.

But when animals get domesticated, because they no longer have to worry about survival, particularly obtaining food, they are freed up to express empathy and take care of other animals. This article gives examples of some unlikely pairings, including an orangutan caring for tiger cubs, a male pig with a lamb, and a chihuahua with a marmoset (great pictures at the website). The book Unlikely Friendships, by National Geographic magazine writer Jennifer Holland, documents 47 stories of interspecies relationship, including the Biblical lion lying down with the lamb: a female lion adopted a baby antelope at a nature reserve in Kenya.

An Objective Morality

I’ve been involved in a couple of forums where the subject of morality has come up. In one, the members are interested in spirituality. Some of these people seem to think that non-dualist spirituality means there is no such thing as bad or good. Everything’s perfect so morality is basically meaningless.

On the other forum, most of the members are atheists, and they’re trying to understand how an objective morality could exist. The question is, without a God imposing morality on humanity, how can a human system be anything but relative?

I’m not an atheist, but I don’t think God intervenes in the evolution of the universe. In other words, I think the unfolding of evolution proceeds in an inevitable fashion. So I like to find ways to explain phenomena like “morality” and “love” without recourse to metaphysics (although I think there can be an explanation from an underlying ground of consciousness, see note at end).

This question of the objectivity of morality is important. By objective I mean something that can be agreed upon by other people. If morality is subjective, that means you can just do what you like; there would be no difference between saving someone from drowning and cheating that person out of their life’s savings. Any society that adopted that ethos would quickly descend into chaos. 

Last year I read philosopher Alexander Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and enjoyed it quite a bit more than I thought I would. I think part of the reason is that Rosenberg attempts to understand concepts such as morality as evolved behaviors.

Evolutionary biologists propose that a special dynamic of evolution called “group selection” has brought about altruism in humans: groups in which the members cooperated and could trust each other did better than groups in which there was a lot of infighting and deceit (see this blog post). This process led to the development of moral attributes.

Rosenberg asserts that there is a core morality that all human societies share, and the most basic components of that morality are: reciprocity, fairness/equality, trustworthiness/honesty, and caring for your children. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (you can read chapter 9 free online which discusses morality) has identified six candidates: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Other possibilities, he says, are property, honesty, and a dislike of wastefulness.

Rosenberg writes, “All societies and cultures have words for anger, disdain, shame, and guilt, and in each, they name roughly the same set of bodily feelings.” Shame is the feeling we get when we go against core moral principles, and blushing is a signal to the others in the group that we realized we made an error.

When it appears that other cultures don’t share this core morality, Rosenberg says it is because of the interference of beliefs (see this post for more on beliefs):

The next step in understanding moral disagreement involves recognizing that such disagreements always result from the combination of core morality with different factual beliefs. When you combine the uncontroversial norms of the moral core with some of the wild and crazy beliefs people have about nature, human nature, and especially the supernatural, you get the ethical disagreements that are so familiar to cultural anthropology.

Humans Are All Members of the Same Tribe

Why does morality exist? Is this evidence of a metaphysical realm, or can it be explained as an evolutionary adaptation? Recently I’ve read a couple of books that argue that morality is a product of natural selection.

The Science of Good and Evil (2004) is by Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine. He begins by providing an evolutionary explanation for morality, which I found very plausible. Shermer claims that all moral attributes can be explained by natural selection over the millions of years of human evolution: groups in which members cooperated and could trust each other did better than groups that had a lot of infighting and deceit.

In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011), author Alex Rosenberg’s discussion of the evolution of morality parallels The Science of Good and Evil.

In particular, Rosenberg identifies a core morality, which includes cooperation, fairness/equality, and trustworthiness, which is recognized by all human societies. He has an interesting discussion about how different societies interpret this core morality differently due to their different beliefs. For example, all societies think caring for your children is moral, but some Islamic cultures believe that includes genital mutilation of their girls: if you didn’t do this no man would marry her. This doesn’t mean they don’t share the core moral value that caring for children is good, they just filter that through beliefs that we in the West would call mistaken.

American culture has been under the sway of Social Darwinism for over a hundred years now. We mistakenly believe Darwin’s theory of natural selection means competition is the natural way to behave and thrive. Our version of capitalism is dependent on ruthless cutthroat competition. Supposedly capitalism works so well because it is the system that most closely follows the natural law of selfishness.

But now biologists and anthropologists say that that interpretation of Darwin's theory is incomplete. Natural selection works through both competition and cooperation. Humans survived as a species because we learned to cooperate. This is the adaptation that allowed us to become the dominant animal on the planet.

Rosenberg imagines two early hominids (creatures that predated Homo sapiens) on the savannah coming across a half-eaten gazelle. At this point hominids were quite a bit lower on the food chain than we are today. If both the hominids ate at the same time, maybe the animal that killed the gazelle would return, or a pack of jackals would ambush them, and they both would be killed. But if they cooperated, if one watched while the other grabbed food for both of them and then they shared it in a safer location, they would increase their chances of survival.

One of the ways we can tell that evolution has programmed us to cooperate is to study babies. How do they behave before they have had time to learn about social interactions? Chimpanzees almost never help another and never share information. But Rosenberg writes, modern “human babies do all these things, and with strangers, well before they can do much more than crawl. They help, they share food, they even convey information before they have language and certainly without knowing anything about norms or niceness. That means that human babies have both an ability conveniently called theory of mind and an inclination to cooperate; both are hardwired or quickly and easily learned with very little experience at a very early age.”

What’s important to realize is that hominids learned to cooperate with the members of their group. Prehistoric groups fought with other hominid groups for possession of resources and territory. Shermer debunks the noble savage myth, which he says is still very strong in our culture, in particular in terms of violence. Many people seem to believe that violence is a recent development: a product of civilization, or patriarchy, or other relatively recent development. Shermer cites the numerous examples of anthropological sites dating back tens of thousands of years that show humans suffering violent deaths from such things as a hatchet blow to the head.

In addition, these early human groups believed they were special and better than people outside their group. Shermer uses an Amazonian tribe, the Yanomamo people, as a window into the thinking of people unaffected by modern civilization. They “consider themselves to be the ultimate chosen people—in their language their name represents humanity, with all other peoples as something less than human.” He quotes Aldous Huxley: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that the other set is human. By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation.” [From The Olive Tree, 1937]

Early human social evolution was the story of small tribes cooperating within the group and fighting other groups. For most of humanity’s time on this planet, tribes numbered no more than 150 people. But in the last ten thousand years, the size of our social groups has mushroomed. Shermer includes a chart illustrating this remarkably rapid social evolution of humans:

100,000 – 10,000 years ago                  Bands                        10s – 100s of individuals

10,000 – 5,000 years ago                      Tribes                        100s – 1000s of individuals

5,000 – 3,000 years ago                        Chiefdoms                 1,000s – 10,000s of individuals

3,000 – 1,000 years ago                        States                        10,000s – 100,000s of individuals

1,000 – present                                      Empires                    100,000s – 1,000,000s of individuals

In other words, 10,000 years ago all of humankind lived in small groups made up of extended families. Imagine living in a group made up of your aunts, uncles, cousins, second-cousins, etc. Maybe you wouldn’t be related to everyone in your group, but everyone would be very much like you.

Today people live in groups made up of millions of people. I live in the United States, part of a 300-million-member group. Most Americans identify as a member of this group and cheer on its victories (most medals in the Olympics) and bemoan its defeats and threats (9/11, China's rise, Islamic terrorism, etc). We are capable of feeling a kinship with hundreds of millions of people, many of whom are very different from ourselves. Most of us never give this a moment’s thought, but being able to feel a membership in this large and diverse a group is an incredibly significant advance in consciousness.

I talked about these ideas with a friend, and he seemed to dismiss the idea that human social organization is improving. Finally I asked him, “Do you think human culture evolves?” He replied, “I don’t think evolution necessarily means things get better.” Very true—evolution just means a change that renders an organism better adapted to its environment. However, it is our ability to work together that has allowed us to prosper in every environment on this planet—from the poles to the Equator.

From what my friend said he seems to think humans’ ability to interact socially has gotten worse over the last ten thousand years. It occurred to me that there are a lot of new-age/liberals out there who probably feel the same way about this; they romanticize those small hunter-gatherer tribes.

I have a very different spin. Once upon a time, each tribe of 150 or so considered their members the only true humans. Now we can feel a common identity with 300 million people. Soon we’ll be capable of perceiving that every person on the planet is a member of our tribe—the human tribe—and the amount of creative energy that will be released by no longer having to fight each other will be astronomical.

Economic System Reflects a Society’s Values

Many economists, Paul Krugman among them, argue that we must separate economics from values and morality.

However, I believe that an economic system is a direct expression of a society’s values.

The Republican Party has been known as the “party of values” for years now because they are obsessed with issues of sexuality: abortion, homosexuality, the “sanctity” of marriage, etc.

At the same time conservatives advocate a hard-line market capitalism which is brutal in its effects on society. Their wildest dream is to eliminate all federal regulations and the New Deal and Great Society social programs, making our economic system even more exploitative and unjust.

Morality doesn’t just mean issues of sex. Morality means ethics, principles, and values. How do our values inform our social interactions? How do we treat our neighbors? How do we care for the poor and the sick and the needy in our midst? Do we care about social justice? Do we care about the impact of our actions on the environment?

Free-market capitalism reflects a society whose values are based completely on greed and short-term self-interest: get all I can for myself and my family with no concern for the consequences to the society I live in and the world at large.

We have been convinced by economists and politicians that greed-driven capitalism is the best system on Earth, but there are new forms of economic interaction emerging that challenge this belief and reveal that people are driven by factors other than greed and self-interest.

Harvard University professor Yochai Benkler has just published a new book describing these new economic systems, “The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest.”

The publisher’s abstract from Amazon says:

For centuries, we as a society have operated according to a very unflattering view of human nature: that, humans are universally and inherently selfish creatures. As a result, our most deeply entrenched social structures – our top-down business models, our punitive legal systems, our market-based approaches to everything from education reform to environmental regulation - have been built on the premise that humans are driven only by self interest, programmed to respond only to the invisible hand of the free markets or the iron fist of a controlling government. In the last decade, however, this fallacy has finally begun to unravel, as hundreds of studies conducted across dozens of cultures have found that most people will act far more cooperatively than previously believed.

In the October American Prospect there is an article about companies that facilitate sharing of possessions, like cars, bicycles, and houses; “The Commons,” by Monica Potts, which quotes professor Benkler:

Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who has written two books on the subject, calls this type of economic model the social market, because it draws upon the obligations we feel to one another. The incentives to join and share go beyond monetary compensation…For Benkler, the rise and persistence of all of these services just shows that the social market is fundamental to human nature. Its existence is only surprising because economists have done such a good job convincing us that people need top-down control systems, as in state-run communist economies, or market incentives like raises or bonuses, to work for the benefit of a larger group. ‘They said everything could be understood through rational self-interest,’ he says, but it isn’t true. ‘We are more like how we tell our kids to be on the playground than what the economists say.’