TrueLife - Our Moral Fate Part 1: Evolution, Escape, and the Tribal Forces Shaping Humanity

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/From the first sparks of human consciousness, morality has been both compass and cage. In Part 1 of Our Moral Fate, George Monty investigates the evolutionary and psychological foundations of ethics, the escape mechanisms that obscure our awareness, and the tribal forces that bind — or divide — civilizations.This episode lays the groundwork for understanding how humans negotiate right and wrong, loyalty and self-interest, and how those forces shape the arc of culture and civilization.In this episode:The evolutionary origins of moral behaviorHow tribalism affects cooperation, conflict, and societal structuresPsychological escape mechanisms and their ethical consequencesThe interplay between survival instincts and conscious choiceInsights from anthropology, psychology, and historyAll the links to Dr. Buchanan below: https://mitpress.mit.edu › books › our-moral-fatehttps://www.amazon.com › Our-Moral-Fate-Evolution-Tribalism › dp › 0262043742https://freedomcenter.arizona.edu › our-moral-fate One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze lights my war cry born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. That just opens up. Dr. Buchanan, welcome to the True Life podcast. I am so thankful that you have decided to spend some time with me today. I put all your links down below. If you would be so kind, it's just to give people your background,

and I have already let people know about the tremendous and daring book called Our Moral Fate. So if you could maybe take it away and give me your background, that'd be great. Sure, thank you for having me. Well, I'm a professor of philosophy, and I've usually had appointments in law schools as well. I work in a number of different areas. I work on the ethics of using biotechnologies to enhance schools. human capacity to make us better than human. Have a book called Better Than Human.

I've worked in the field of philosophy of international law. I've actually done some policy advising at the highest levels. I've advised the government of Canada on what to do if Quebec tries to secede. I've been advising the president of Catalonia on his strategies for making Catalonia independent of Spain and believe it or not I actually helped draft a clause of the Ethiopian Constitution in 1993 so I'm not just a theorist I actually try to get out in the world and do some things I mainly work now in in political philosophy but increasingly I've got interested in the evolution of human beings

and trying to think about how our evolutionary history might influence the way we are now and what the possibilities are for us. That just opens up so many more questions I have to think. You know, when I was reading your book, I had read a little bit about another book you had read that was similar about that you co-author with another gentleman on the evolution of morality. However, as I read your book, it makes sense that you would be a policy advisor. One thing I did not expect was that I laughed out loud a few times. Like when you made comparisons to other evolutionary theorists such as our moral origins,

when you talked about that book and the author that are written that book, I really liked the way you communicated your ideas about where he may have gone wrong. And specifically, I think you said something around like, here's what I think he meant to say, and here's what he should have said. Just like these, it was so whiteheadian of you. You know, I really, I really enjoyed it. And it really reminded me of Alfred North Whitehead in so many ways. I kind of wanted to, yeah, it's huge.

He's one of my favorites. He's one of my favorites. And I just, I couldn't, I couldn't continue the interview without telling you that. Because it is a giant compliment. And I'm thankful to get to be talking to you. Could you, would you be so kind as to tell us a little bit about mask wearing versus anti-mask wearing during the COVID-19 and why we. have the moral conflicts. You know, it's interesting.

A few months ago, I stepped outside of my house, and for some reason I had a mask on, and a neighbor said, oh, I see you voted for Biden. This, to me, was just like encapsulated everything that's wrong with what's going on the country. What's happened is that we're in this tribalistic mode, and everything is a matter of, of sorting people into us versus them and using various signs like wearing masks or what they

say or what car they drive to help us sort people. And we sort them into these big groups and we assume that everybody in the other group is exactly the same. They all, they're robotically the same. And we're afraid to say anything that might lead members of our group think of us as disloyal or is not really one of the true. believers. Everything is a matter of sorting and signaling, sorting into groups and signaling your allegiance to one group and you're not in another group. And so something which shouldn't be at all

political, namely mask wearing, becomes a symbolic battlefield. And see, this is what I find really one of the things that I'm most disturbing about tribalism. It's totalizing. It invades every aspect of life. Every aspect of life becomes a matter of us versus that. There's nothing that's left untouched by it. And I think this is just disastrous, but, you know, the worst thing about what I call tribalism is that when you sort people into groups, you tend to sort the other, the bad guys, and say that they're all either irredeemably stupid and misinformed or irredeemably corrupt and insincere. And if you view people that way, you won't even try to communicate with them.

with them. Everything they say you'll interpret through that lens. You won't listen. And this is the death of democracy because democracy requires bargaining and compromise and meeting in the middle. And you can't get that in the tribalistic mode. That's off the, because in the tribalistic mode, everything is viewed as a zero-sum conflict. What I win, you lose, and vice versa. There's no idea of a common interest, no idea of a reasonable compromise. And communication, has just broken down completely. I have never seen anything like it. I mean, you can say something and people won't hear what you said. They'll just take it as a signal for putting you in a particular box, sorting you into one group rather than the other. Let me give you an example.

I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh, not because I agreed with him on most things, but just because I thought it was interesting to see the thought patterns. And he kept saying over and over again that Democrats weren't really concerned about the welfare of immigrants. They only wanted open borders because they thought immigrants will vote Democratic. Now, this is a common tribalistic strategy. That is, you don't listen to the arguments for relaxing border restrictions. You just listen to the messenger and you brand the messenger, in this case, as being insincere, right? And so then you dismiss it. It's a very convenient way to avoid engaging with the issues, right? You just label the messenger as either incredibly stupid or insincere,

and then you don't listen. And by the way, the other strategy, labeling the other as stupid is perfectly captured with the term libotard. Have you heard this term? I have heard it. Yeah. If all liberals are, you know, seriously, mentally deficient or insincere, there's no point in talking to that couldn't possibly learn anything from it. And similarly on the other side, I mean, in some universities, if there's an advertisement that a speaker is going to appear, somebody brands the speaker as a racist or a sexist, and then others take that as sufficient for boycotting it or disrupting the lecture or whatever.

And there's never any engagement, and there's never any sort of stepping back and saying, well, what do I mean by sexism? What is racism? Is this guy really a really racist or sexist. And if he is, is that sufficient for silencing him? Or does that mean this is somebody we should try to engage with and might even change his mind or, God forbid, we might even learn something from? It's such a great point. And that brings up another fascinating point to me. You, in your book, you compared our moral evolution and the moral system to the linguistic system. And since we were just talking about people using, you know, just these abstracts.

hominem attacks like libtard or communist or just these short soundbites that have fundamentally I mean does no one read the classics anymore do we not know about sophistry do we not know that when but the debate is lost slander becomes the tool of the loser and in a world of TikTok and social media where sound bites are so competing for attention so fast you know that I think is another evolution of our the linguistic system and I'm curious about how you feel about the changing language of today but before you talk about that could you maybe fill people in on your analogy between the moral system and the linguistic system I thought it was a beautiful a beautiful intro there well thank you

yeah I guess it goes like this I mean every normal human being has a linguistic mind they have a set of capacity for learning a language now which language they learn is going to depend upon what environment they're in, what the stimulus is. So it's a sort of general capacity, and it can get expressed in a number of different ways, different languages. Well, similarly, I think that humans evolved to have what you might call a moral mind, and it's a set of capacities for having moral feelings or sentiments like indignation and sympathy, and for engaging in moral reasoning, applying moral concepts. But how that set of capacities gets expressed depends a lot upon what the environment is in which the child develops the moral mind.

Now, if you're living in a society where the environment in which everybody's moral mind develops is a very harsh environment and one in which other groups really are a serious threat, and there are no good institutions to enable peaceful cooperation with strangers, then the moral mind is going to get developed in a certain direction. It's going to develop in a more tribalistic. It's going to produce people that tend to have a tendency to be very suspicious or fearful or aggressive toward strangers. But if the moral mind develops in another environment,

where there are lots of opportunities for mutually beneficial, peaceful cooperation with strangers, and where you're not living on the margin of subsistence so that, you know, what the other guys get, you don't get, where it's not a zero-sum game in terms of resources for survival, then the moral mind is plastic enough, it's flexible enough to develop moralities that are more inclusive, that don't just say, well, yes, among us, we have strong moral obligations, but other people are just not members of the moral community at all. That's the tribalism. I think that when human beings started out, really becoming human beings,

they had a moral mind that was pretty flexible, but the environment that they were in was one which tended to push the development of the moral mind in a certain direction, namely in a more tribalistic way. I mean, the standard story is that at the time that our moral mind was evolving, humans lived in widely scattered, small hunter-gatherer groups, and they were, you know, competing if they ran into other groups or resources for survival. They spoke different languages. They would encounter people, and probably the best risk management strategy was to eat. either run or to attack them because you couldn't trust that they would understand you, that they would pre-you well, et cetera.

And also, in this kind of environment, if humans were really pretty scattered, when they did encounter each other, the other group might have diseases to which you weren't immune. And that's another reason for adopting an attitude of hostility rather than welcoming other people. So I think that one mistake that some evolutionary thinkers make is they look at the circumstances with the moral mind evolve. They don't distinguish enough between the moral mind, which is quite flexible, and the particular expression of it in that environment.

And then they say, well, we're sort of condemned to tribalism. I think this is a mistake. I think that just like the linguistic mind, how the moral mind gets expressed depends really heavily on the environment. And here's the kicker. thicker. Human beings are niche constructors, are ex-a-loss. They construct environments. They're constantly constructing and reconstituting environments. And recently, I'd say the last 300 years or so, in some parts of the world, some human beings have constructed environments

that are much more friendly toward the moral mind being expressed in a more inclusive, less tribalistic morality. Now, if we could figure out exactly what the interaction is is between the moral mind and particular environments and engineer environments in the right way, we could be the best that we can be morally. We could get the best out of the potential of our moral mind. That's the good news. The bad news is that there are people who have an interest in shaping our environment to bring out our worst moral nature, our tribalistic attitudes, their demagogues, and what they do is

they try to convince us, convince us, that the other group really is a threat. And often they use disease metaphors, right? I remember looking at fox and horns, and one of the talking heads said that this caravan of people coming from Central America was carrying smallpox. Now, that's quite a trick,

because smallpox was officially declared eradicated from planet Earth in 1980. In the last single case that was reported was in Somalia, in 1977. And yet this caravan is riddled with people carrying smallpox. And you know, this was a technique of the Nazis. There's a horrible film called The Eternal Jew. The opening scene is the hold of a ship opening and swarms of rats are coming out. The idea of infectious agents, plagues, is always what gets associated with an out group

that you want to dehumanize and demonize and destroy. And it's used, you know, it's used all the time. I mean, if you listen to right-wing talk radio about immigration, they're punching all of the primordial buttons to try to evoke the tribalistic mentality in attitudes toward immigrants. And it happens on the other side, too. I mean, it's a matter of not just disagreeing with the other. it's a matter of holding them in contempt and or fear and demonizing them and presenting every

dispute as a kind of manichaean struggle Armageddon, right? Everything is linked together. There's nothing that's not a serious dispute. Everything is a matter of life or death. I mean, think about the title of Sean Hannity's latest book, America on the Brink. free or die this is this kind of totalizing phenomenon of tribalism that everything is supposedly

linked together in some large pattern and so you know you can't give an inch on one thing because it means capitulating on the battle between good versus evil and it forces people

into making horrible choices choices. They think that they have to choose their tribe's whole bundle, no matter how abhorrent some aspects of it are, or they've got to choose the other bundle completely. And I think that our political institutions don't help with this. I mean, if we had proportional representation, and if we had a kind of parliamentary system where people had to form coalitions, they had to compromise to get a government going. That would be much better. As it is, it's winner take all, and we have only two, we need more than two parties,

I'll tell you that. You have two parties, that's right for the tribalistic scenario. So, you know, there are some structural changes that might help, but I'm not very optimistic because there's a kind of arms race phenomenon to this. You know, if one side is acting in a really nasty, tribalistic way, and the other side tries to be Goody Tooshoes. They may be at a disadvantage. Especially, you really hit the nail out in the sort of sound bite TikTok world. I think that people are losing the capacity for sustained thinking, you know, for really working through something over a period of time.

They don't have the patience for it. You know, I see this with students. I used to teach in a business school. I used to business ethics. Is that an oxymoron? Well, the story, you know, the business ethic dilemma is, you know, a child walks in to your store and drops a $100 bill, walks out, and the question, the ethical question is, do you take all or divide it with your partner? That is hilarious. Yeah.

So in the business school, the standard assignment was, you know, you know, the business school, the standard assignment was for students to write memos that were like, you know, half a page long on some incredibly complicated subject. And it drove me crazy. I mean, you have to have patience to try to think through issues. And I think that that's getting more difficult for people because the whole media is structured for sound bites, for very quick attention-grabbing black and white kinds of messages. and most people just don't have the patience and they're losing the skills for sustained reflection and for long, you know, chains of inference, right, arguments. There's a philosopher in Columbia, Anthony McCruma and Alpia, and he described the dilemma that I've been in before. You're on a plane and somebody next year says, what do you do for a living?

And if you say you're a philosopher, you know, the likely response is, well, let me tell you about my philosophy, right? So what Anthony Othia does, when somebody asks those questions, they ask him, what's your, they ask him, what's your philosophy? And he says, is that things are more complicated than you think? And that he refuses to say anything more. And I really get that feeling. Things are more complicated, but people want simple solutions. And so many people are fully convinced that their tribe has all the right answers. They're just completely convinced of that.

They think they have nothing to learn from the other side. And I think this is crazy because, look, there's a reason why the contrast between liberals or progressives and conservatives is a perennial contrast in human societies, right? There's something there on both sides. Otherwise, one side would have won centuries ago. There is a kernel of truth in both of these things, but most people don't do that. And here's the other thing I find strange. You hear people saying how much fake news there is and how you can't trust the media, but

they trust their media. They think that the left-wing press is totally biased or the right-wing press is. I think everything is biased. everything is partisan, I don't know what to believe anymore. It's just, unless it's in an area that I've done independent research in, I try to maintain an attitude of agnosticism because I have seen increasing bias in even media outlets that I used to trust a lot. Yeah, I agree.

I think that this concept of linguistics is, it's so fascinating to me because, you know, I think that people, they want to give people their philosophy because they want to get out what they think. And, you know, we're so, it's such a toxic environment that we're afraid to engage because it ends up in these attacking one another. And it brings me to the idea of what Samuel Clemens said that the written word was the carcass of the spoken word. And so there's a handful of spoke, there's a handful of pundits that can speak elegant and tend to make somewhat cogent, arguments. However, those are just parroted by other people. And so they, those people go out and they try to repeat those. And they've never had, just like every pundit, never give someone the opportunity to debate them. I think we could have such a better world. And I think that people

want to communicate. They want to get up there and they want to be the person debating. But let's see what happens when you can have someone sit across from you and have an intelligent debate. I recently talked to the teachers at my children's school about COVID and it's very difficult to, you know, no one wants to be this. No one wants to be that. No one wants to be a Liptard or a trumper or, and, you know, my daughter goes to an amazing school. I love the, I love the staff there. And when I write letters to the principal, I talk about critical thinking and moving forward. And, you know, wouldn't it be a great idea if us as parents and teachers, brought in Oxford-style debates to public school so the kids could kind of make up their own mind.

Instead of us pushing our isms, like when we talk about the evolution of the moral, flexible mind, what better way to make that happen than to instill that in our kids and allow them to make the decisions? Let them debate and then make them switch sides and debate each other. So they have to empathize with one another. I've got to think that empathy in language, in the spoken word, is the best. way to move forward with the evolution of the moral mind. That brings me to... That's exactly right.

I think that one of the reasons that what you see in virtual communication is so degenerate is that it doesn't have the same human impact as face-to-face oral communication. People will say things on the internet that they would never say face-to-face with somebody. And getting people in the same room together, getting them talking. And I also agree with this idea that children should be given the chance to see both sides of an issue. Instead, what we're seeing now is censorship. You see groups purging the libraries of schools of certain books so that children won't be exposed. Instead, they should leave the books there and they should have debates about the books.

But instead, they're not doing this. And I think that's right. I think people, not you, but people have underestimated what a difference it makes, whether you're communicating with a keyboard, with people who you know nothing about and maybe thousands of miles away, or whether you're in a small room face-to-face with them, and you pick up all sorts of cues, right, which can elicit your empathy from the expression on their face when you say something, from the tone of their voice, and they can have the same kind of relationship with you. and it's harder to be callously disrespectful and cavalier when you're engaging with somebody

than it is directly than it is when you're using virtual communication. And I think we've got to do more of this and critical thinking. I mean, that's the most important that any student could take. And I think the sooner the better. but you know it's just their critical thinking goes completely out the window with tribalism because tribalism is just a matter of holding up banners right array for us array for that you're this we're that it's not a matter of thinking really it may have the appearance of thinking in the sense of a quest for facts or a quest for truth but it's not about that at all it's about signaling

and sorting it's about showing your loyalty to your group disdaining the other group it's not about cognition really cognition is just a means toward the sorting and signaling you brought up another interesting point in the book about adaptive plasticity i thought this was fascinating could you fill in the people maybe kind of give them a an idea of what that is my favorite example of in biology of adaptive plasticity there's a little critical water flea and if the water flea hatches in an aquatic environment where there are the chemical signals of predators that eat water fleas it develops spines and a kind of helmet for

protection if it hatches out in the aquatic environment where there are no such predators it doesn't develop those spines and helmet at all it looks completely different you think it's a different species okay well I think of us is like that and I think that the moral mind exhibits adaptive plasticity. So if you start as a child developing your moral powers in an environment where there's a lot of hostility toward the other and where the other may really pose a serious threat, they're like the predators that eat the water flea, you're going to develop all sorts of defensive mental attitudes, including maybe an attitude that it's okay to engage in preemptive violence towards

people that are going to be attacking you, and you're going to have suspicion and distrust toward foreigners, and it's going to be really important for you to develop ways of sorting people. Is it one of us, those bad guys? But if you grow up in an environment where you don't have those cues, then your moral mind may develop in a way

that facilitates a more inclusive morality, where you're more open towards strangers. You look at encounters with strangers as opportunities rather than its threats. So I think the moral mind is adaptively plastic in the sense that how it gets expressed depends heavily upon environmental forces. And there's a pretty wide range of different developmental paths

that can take depending upon what the environment's like. So yeah, I like that. That's one of my favorite examples in the book. I also use an example in the book. I don't know if you picked up on it. I'm talking about the problem of bias samples. You know, when people look at human history, they see a lot of tribalistic behavior.

And so they say, well, humans are tribalistic, right? Well, that may be because most of human history, they've been in environments where it was pretty adaptive to be tribalistic, right? OK, to illustrate the idea of a biased sample in the book, I talk about the lousy lover who was convinced that the female orgasm, is a myth because he has several women none of have had one like this I try to pick examples

this like I'll remember forever okay so every now and then I permit myself a little you know questionable humor I think it's I think it shows through in the book and it's you know a lot of people who read who read books that are deep in philosophy or whatever they a lot of them sometimes the material can be pretty dry and so like I said it's so whiteheading you know it's beautiful and there's you're going along going along and then you just see this reducto de absurdum right there and it's it's it's beautifully done I I wanted to bring up one more point on the uh adaptive plasticity do you think that we say that the moral mind also is is has an adaptive plasticity do you think that neural plasticity is the same as adaptive adaptive plasticity well i think that you have to have

adaptive plasticity i think it's right okay necessary condition for and everything we've been learning about neurology is is indicating that there's a tremendous amount of neural plasticity and by the way you know when i use the term the moral mind i don't want to take it too seriously i don't act like a moment is a completely separate module right right i think it's just the, they're sort of general, highly plastic capacities of the human mind, and they get applied in certain directions, or they get sort of specialized in certain ways that we might call it the moral mind. But yeah, I think that neural plasticity is the fundamental prerequisite for adaptive plasticity of the kind that humans have, right? Not with water, right? Right. But yeah, I think

that's right and I just think that you know the there's a sort of two things to steer between here one is looking at the evolution of human beings and not taking plasticity seriously enough and thinking that the way we were when we first evolved morality is the way we're condemned to be forever that is the evolution imposes really terribly rigid constraints on what we can be The other is to not pay any attention to our evolutionary origins and act as if we were just a blank slate and we can do whatever we want. I think that neither of those views is correct. Now here's a kind of further twist on this.

I don't talk much about it in this book than other books I have. And that is, okay, you think about the moral mind like the linguistic mind. It's a set of capacities that human beings normally are born with that they have to be, developed through stimuli. But what if we could intervene at the genetic level and actually change the moral mind itself? I mean, people have talked about the possibility of moral enhancement, okay, biotechnological means. And for one thing, people have said, look, you know, being empathetic is an important part of being moral. What if we could sort of ramp up our capacity for empathy by genetically engineering embryos.

If we found out enough about what the complex of genes were that were responsible for the development of the capacity for empathy, maybe we could enhance it. Maybe we could enhance our cognitive powers in a way that would make us better morally because we can reason better, right, about what to do. We'd be more patient to go through a process of reflection and reasoning before we decided what to do.

So that's a whole other twist on it. I mean, in the book that we're talking about, I just take the moral mind as fixed, as something that evolved maybe four or five hundred thousand years ago, and the moral mind itself has, I assume, hasn't changed much at all, maybe not at all. What changes how it gets expressed in different environments. But if you take that thing that you've been holding as constant

and consider the possibility of actually changing it, then the possibilities, the space for possible morality, opens up, I think, tremendously. I'm not sure we're not ready to do that now, but it's something we're thinking about. I mean, you know, people talk about human nature, and at least the more realistic ones, admit that there's some nasty features of human nature and some limitations. Well, instead of just sort of bemoaning that and lowering our sights for, progress to fit that. What if we change human nature? What if we go down to the basic level of re-engineering? That's something that with new technologies, it looks like it's going to be

possible to do eventually. Yeah, I would almost argue that that's what's happening right now is a re-engineering of the environment in which we see ourselves, or the way the planet sees itself for that matter. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's very clear. I said that human beings are niche constructors par excellence. Right. We're re-engineering our environment.

And what we failed to recognize is that in doing that we're in a way re-engineering ourselves because we're so dependent on the environment. I mean, we constantly underestimate the power of the forces that we unleash by changing our environment. And that's certainly true with the Internet. Nobody anticipated that it would change. social relations. It would change people's conception of their identity. It would change all sorts of things as profoundly as it has. And, you know, it's just a matter of, you know,

creating a tool for one purpose and failing to realize that you're not going to be able to control it and it's going to do all sorts of other kinds of things. It's, you know, Marx used to talk about or write about commodities and he said, you know, the worker creates the commodity, and then the commodity becomes an alien force exerting control over the worker. You know, that's the alienation of the work product from the worker. And we're seeing this in a big way. We create technologies, we create political institutions, and we create them for some limited purpose. But then it turns out that they have a life of their own, and they produce all sorts of unintended consequences,

to some of which we never would have wanted at the outset when we started creating it. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of what Plato tells us in Tameas, where he talks about, oh, Toth, my paragon of invention, it is very unwise for the person who creates a technology to forecast what that technology is going to do. You know, the people that invent the technology often are, it's their child, it's their baby, so they see what it can be, but it never ends up that way. It's like your kids, he's going to be the president. Come on, you know, but you can see it happening in tech right now.

They've created this behemoth, which hopefully will be like the Jewish tradition and be fed to the righteous. You know what I mean? Yeah. No, it's, well, you know, sometimes I'm very pessimistic about this. Sometimes we're optimistic. I mean, I think that we're at such an early stage with the Internet and with the Internet and with the fantastic inundation of information that we get,

that it's not surprising that we're not handling it very well, right? Because all of our epistemic norms, our norms about how to manage our beliefs, what to believe, they were developed in a completely different environment. So it may just be that there's a learning curve and that in a couple of generations, people become more critical consumers of what they get on the Internet. I'm hoping that.

Some people already are. Some people are already beginning to be more savvy about discerning which sources are credible or more credible than others. But unless that happens, the situation is just going to be right for demagoguery and for people who have an interest in eliciting our worst tribalistic attitudes. Because it's just amazing how uncritical people are about the sources of their belief, especially on the end. internet. I mean, many people don't know the difference between a peer-reviewed journal and one that isn't. They don't have a good idea of who the real experts are. And see, this is another problem. In the current political climate, even well-credentialed experts are not being viewed as credible anymore. There's a huge loss of epistemic legitimacy, if you want, he's a fancy term. And when

that happens, then we're really in trouble. And it's a kind of paradox because for the first time in human history, we have more accurate, practically important information cheaply available to everybody. But that doesn't mean anything if people don't know how to use it. And if people don't know how to sort out the good information and the bad information. And you think about, you know, how can we possibly have a reasonable response to climate change if there's a whole industry of people generating skepticism about even the most basic facts about climate change and if many people in general public are just unable to discern when somebody is

really an expert and when they're not it's just tragic I mean it's you know the the output of information is fantastic the uptake is scandalously bad yeah This touches on what you spoke about in the beginning of your book about the popularization of somewhat scientific papers, and it leads us to the two undarwinian dogmas that you talked about in your book. Could you explain that to the people a little bit? Well, you know, it's interesting. There's a new phenomenon in academia. There are some people who are pretty well trained and knowledgeable about, say, human evolution,

but they decide that they want to become popular people, public intellectuals. They sell a lot of book. It's hard to do that in a scrupulous way. It's really hard to write a book that's accurate and balanced, but widely accessible to a soundbite kind of audience. And some people have succeeded in popularizing evolutionary moral psychology, but at the price, I think, of accuracy, and they've oversimplified. And one of the main simplifications that you get from a number of people who are quite intelligent,

have done good work, and who write very popular scientific books, one of the things they put forward is this sort of simple slogan, that morality is a type of cooperation. Okay, now, I think that there's a mistake here, because I think that human morality originated because it facilitated cooperation. That is, it was originally an adaptation for cooperation. But that doesn't mean that it's just a type of cooperation. To say it's just type of cooperation to say that you can understand everything about human morality

just by seeing how it facilitates cooperation. And I don't think that's right. I use an analogy in the book, okay? A lot of people now think that the extraordinary rotational flexibility of the human shoulder joint is an adaptation for throwing projectiles. That is, that human beings came to develop that rotational flexibility because it facilitated the throwing of projectiles, and that increased their reproductive fitness back in an early environment

where they needed to bring down big game animals. Well, fine, but does that mean that the shoulder just is a device for throwing projectiles? No, because the shoulder does all sorts of other stuff too. Right. Similarly, I think that it's true that as a matter of explaining the origin of human morality and of the capacities that underlie it, we develop those capacities, we express them in moralities because doing so facilitated cooperation that contributed to our reproductive fitness. That's true.

But I don't think that you can know everything you want to know about morality by just looking at it as a form of cooperation. For example, there are some human moralities that are intensely anti-cooperative. I mean, think about the ascetic ideals of early Christianity, right? You're supposed to go out in the desert, get up on a big rock and sit there, right? Think about God, and you're supposed to give up any relations with your wife, your family, your children, everybody. Okay. That's not exactly about cooperation. But also, if you think about morality as just being a type of cooperation, you're going to tend to think that it's inherently tribalistic.

Why? Because you'll think about moral relationships as being limited to relationships among people who are actually cooperating together or could cooperate together. But I think one of the triumphs of modern morality is that we now think that every human being has certain rights independently of whether there are partners in cooperation with us and independently of whether they even could be partners in cooperation, supposedly they're severely disabled. Similarly, I think it's a big milestone of progress that some human beings now think that some non-human animals have moral standing. And it's not because we view them

as potential cooperators, right? I mean, very few of them can cooperate with us. Some of them can, you know, sheep hurting dogs and stuff like that. But I think that, you know, if you realize that there are lots of non-human animals that are sentient that feel pain just the way we do, suffer just the way we do, then that's enough to begin to move. toward the conclusion that they have some moral standing, that they're not just things we can do what we want to with. And that's completely independent of viewing them as part of a cooperative scheme or not. In fact, I think the modern idea of human rights is the idea of rights that human beings have

just by virtue of being human, not by virtue of their capacity to contribute to cooperation with us. So I think that's another reason why this simplistic slowness. Morgan, morality is a type of cooperation is mistaken. And it confuses a story about the origins of morality with what moralities can become. Just like, I mean, maybe you started out, you would develop this kind of shoulder

because you could throw projectiles at grazing animals on the savannah, right? But now you can use the shoulder to play tennis, to perform modern dance moves, you know, to give the Nazis. Luke, it's awesome stuff to do with it, right? I'm really enjoying the rotational flexibility of my artificial shoulder joint, by the way. That's why I keep using this example.

It's far superior to the original one, even when I was young. It's just fantastic. The old one wear out. The old one wear out? Yeah. Just from overuse. You know, I'm old. I'm in my 70s, and I'm old.

So it just wore out, and I had osteoarthritis, and they just replaced. the whole thing. It's like a hip replacement. It's fantastic.