TrueLife - Our Moral Fate Part 2: 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/Humans are both architects and captives of morality. In this second part of Our Moral Fate, George Monty investigates the evolutionary pressures, escape mechanisms, and tribal instincts that shape collective ethics. From ancient survival strategies to modern societal fractures, this episode asks: How do we navigate the tension between self-interest, group loyalty, and global responsibility?In this episode:How evolution shapes moral intuitionThe role of tribalism in cooperation and conflictEscapism and avoidance as ethical hazardsStrategies to cultivate conscious morality in modern societyLessons from anthropology, psychology, and human historyhttps://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, furious 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 Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Yeah, it is. Sometimes I wonder if there's a race. As someone who is making the human being better and a philosopher, do you see sort of a race between like, Biology and technology as far as making the human better.

Like there's a lot of particular, say, smart drugs or there's different kinds of things we can now take that help potentially make the hippocampus create more dendritic spines and, you know, versus going in and inserting a chip. It seems like there's a race going on there. In fact, I saw this image and I'm going to, I want to try to use my words to paint you a picture because it was so beautiful. There's a sculpture and it's a two-way mirror. And on one side of the sculpture, it's about four feet tall. Someone made a sculpture all in branches of a human figure pushing on it. And on the other side, it's a sculpture made out of tin and wires, and he's pushing on it. And it just so beautifully explained what I was trying to convey about this race between biology and technology.

And it's kind of like left-right brain, left-right politics. It's like we need a corpus callosum to make everybody understand that we're in this. together, you know? So that being said, I think that's really interesting. I mean, I think that there's a sense in which the distinction between biology and technologies is breaking down in the case of genetic engineering, right? I mean, it's not that you just have this fixed nature, human nature, and the only question is can you sort of develop technologies that that nature can use. Instead, technologies now may be sort of penetrating into the thing that you took to be a sort of fixed human nature. And I think in, there's going to be a kind of synergism. I think

there's going to be some, eventually, some genetic engineering that will actually change the biological platform, change the structure of the brain, but then it's going to be mated with technologies. And, you know, that's the whole idea of cybor. right in there are these blends of technologies and biology and I think that's I think that's likely to happen I mean the huge question is you know who's going to do this for what purposes and what is it going to be driven by special interest and also if there are huge improvements are they going to be widely accessible are they just going to be the privilege or the privileged view I mean

I go back and forth and sometimes I'm very depressed and pessimistic and think that, you know, the rich are just going to get biologically richer and the poor folks will be left behind. On the other hand, if you look at some technologies like cell phones, when cell phones were first produced, people thought it was going to be sort of a luxury toy for the rich. And now they're used all over the world. For example, they're used by groups of fishermen in a coastman. to Vietnam to coordinate their catches so they can get the best prices for them, whereas before they were pretty much at the mercy of the buyers. And it's being used to organize economic activity

by very poor people, cell phones are, and it's being used to organize political activity and to monitor police and military brutality all over the world. I mean, it's something that had a completely anticipated effects and very rapidly cell phone technology became widely affordable and that's the hope the hope is that if we get some really powerful human enhanced technologies that they'll become available pretty quickly to a lot of people i think that if it takes the form of of medications of drugs it will happen quickly because the patents will run out and they'll become generic and you'll be able to get them at walmart for four dollars for a month supply like you can with all the other stuff that's gone generic. If it's a matter of expensive operations on embryos,

that's a different matter. That's not going to be affordable for most people. Unless governments decide that to be competitive, they need to subsidize those enhancements for their people because other countries will be doing it. Yeah, that's it. It could come, enhancement could come to be viewed in the way that public education came to be viewed. in the second half of the 19th century in Europe, that is that government leaders thought that for their country be competitive, they had to educate their people.

Well, you may have to enhance people too. That's possibility. Yeah, I think that would be a fantastic moral discussion for people to have, a healthy discussion for people to have. And that brings us to another part of your book where you talk about, you know, how do we build institutions that can,

lead to a more moral environment, but not just the moral environment, the inputs to the moral environment. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think we were sort of talking about this a little earlier. I mean, it may require changes in political institutions to get beyond a two-party polarized system. It may require changes in political institutions and practices that give people strong incentives to bargain and compromise and listen, it may require a completely different kind of education that really takes seriously what virtual communication does, right? I mean, our education systems have not been geared toward the problems that we've been discussing that are attendant on the use of the Internet, especially social media.

So it may require a lot of changes. Now here's a, here's not a very happy thought. Human beings achieve unity only when they have to unite against an external threat. So there are days when I pray for an alien invasion, right? That would sort of get us to cooperate against those horrible things. But, you know, that's horrible. I mean, or it might just turn out that before we see, start getting better, we have to really bottom out. We have to witness sort of a total breakdown

of the political system. And then people just say we can't go on like this. Something has to change. Well, something like this happened at the end of World War II with the creation of the modern human rights system. You know, at the end of World War II, Europe is a smoking ruin. Most of Southeast Asia is the Pacific. Their revelations of the Holocaust. And people just conclude that something has to change in the fundamental way. And so a committee is formed to draft a universal declaration of human rights. And it's quite radical because it's a document which states sign on to to limit their own sovereignty over their own people.

This has never happened before. But I don't think it would have happened in happy circumstances, right? It required a kind of slamming your head against the wall. and people realizing that something fundamental had to change or this horror that we've seen may be repeated. And so I wonder whether at some point if enough people in this country just realize that the way we're going is just the path to ruin, that they may, you know, be willing to take some measures to stop that process. but I don't know. See, the problem is a lot of people when they see

that things are going bad in this country, they just blame the other group. They just say, it's going, it's bad because of those guys. And it's bad because of all of us. We're all contributing to this. And until people realize that, I don't see much hope, actually.

Yeah, we're all guilty. You know, and it's so, it's so easy to blame other people and, oh, you know, it would be different if this happened. And it brings me to the back to what you were saying about when you sit next to somebody, be it education or a debate, there's that felt presence of the other. And that's so important in order to thoroughly understand or better yet recognize yourself and the other person. You can't do that.

We can do it from here a little bit. But when I see you and I know I could reach out and touch you, it's like I can see myself in you. And the moment you do that. This is really important because one of the things that tribalism does is the death of individuality in two ways. It makes all of the other the same, and it makes all of us the same on pain of being a dissident or being disloyal. But with respect to homogenizing the other and making them all the same, it's easy to do that if you're engaged in virtual communication. If you're face-to-face with a person, you're more likely to take them seriously as an individual, right, and vice versa. another reason why it's really important to engage in that kind of communication.

I think that, you know, it's just so easy if you're communicating on the internet and you get a message from somebody and it triggers one of these sorting mechanisms, he's one of those, right? Then automatically you're not viewing that person as an individual. You're just viewing them as a member of that herd. I think it's terribly disrespectful and it's not productive and it's not productive. And it, it doesn't allow for the possibility that, well, even if he's part of this group that's sort of generally bad, he might be a little different. And maybe I can engage with him if I can't engage with the others, and maybe I can even learn something from him. You can't do that if you just view them as a giant monolith. They're just all the same. All liberals are the same, all conservatives are the same.

And it's easier to view them all the same if you're not communicating directly picking up the cues. listening to their voice, seeing their body language, and recognizing that they really are an individual, you know, that even if they're saying the general things that that group says, they're putting a different twist off. There's some evidence that there's some differences there. That's really important, I think. Yeah, I agree. I'm curious to get your thoughts. I have a great quote here from, what is this gentleman's name, from Paul Goodman. And he says, quote, whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy,

not a science. What do you think about that quote? Wow, that's interesting. I mean, Paul Goodman was a very smart guy and very independent thinker. Well, I think that he's right if he means at least this much. That is, that technologies always embody an expression. us and have an impact on values. They're not just like a sort of a neutral tool, like a hammer or something like that, because they were created by somebody for some purpose and they're going to be used in certain ways.

And usually because they don't become available to everybody at the same time, the emergence of new technology has distributed effects. It affects who owns what, who gets what, who has what advantages, what opportunities. So I think technologies are value-laden. And also, there's kind of ambiguity to talk about a technology. You might talk about a gene splicing technology or gene modification technology, and you just describe it as a set of chemical processes, okay? But of course, when it's used, it's always embodied. It's going to be done in somebody's lab, with somebody's funding, with some purposes in mind,

and there are going to be various choices made about how to apply the technology. So that's all going to be bound up with human interest and values. And in that sense, the real technology, the technology that goes out there in the world that changes things, is not going to be some sort of inert, you know, object that has no values attached to it at all. It's not going to be like that. I mean, if the technology really means not just the sort of technical, thing, but also the practice of using it, then I can see why he would say that it sort of embodies a moral philosophy or assumes a moral philosophy. It assumes some set of values, it expresses

some set of values. I think that's right. Yeah, it's fascinating to me. I was thinking recently, too, about what you said about how sometimes it pains you to think about how there may need to be some sort of event or something to happen in order for us to get our wits about us. And be like, okay, what are we doing here? Instead of it being an alien invasion or, God forbid, some sort of weapons of mass destruction, do you think that we could potentially recreate that event with something like a return to the Elusinian mysteries where we had this rites of passage that people did? And they brought this back because I think that's something that's inclusive.

It was slaves. It was emperors. It was this, you know, death of Demeter where this, you know, this understanding of death and rebirth and that maybe you come out of this world instead of coming into it. Does that make sense? Well, you know, it's really interesting. You said that because I was just thinking recently about how deprived of rituals, especially those that you might call mystery rituals, modern society is. So, you know, we don't have them. I mean, we have, like, sports events, you know, and rock concerts. But we don't have things that are an attempt to sort of help us grapple with these huge issues like death.

I don't know. I mean, it's, you know, it's interesting because if you had something like that that would, well, large enough scale, it would have to be sort of neutralists of different religions, for example, okay? Nothing like this was tried, by the way, in the French Revolution. Ope Thierre had this idea of festivals of the Supreme Being. It was supposed to be Christ or Buddha or anything like that, but the supreme being, right? And his idea was that to get people on board with a project of creating a new France, you know, through the revolution, that there had to be some social glue, and he didn't want it to be traditional religion.

because it was too much associated with the Catholic hierarchy and all the things fighting against. But he thought that human beings needed some kind of quasi-religious belief, and they needed some public rituals to express this kind of belief. So he put on a few of these festivals of the Supreme Being, and they weren't really terribly successful. A lot of the other people in the ruling group at that time thought he was completely nuts because they were militant atheism.

Right. You know, it's, I mean, it's an attractive idea in a way. I'm just not sure it's practical at this point. You know, it's funny because when people now talk about spirituality, they tend to talk about it in a very individualistic way. They don't think about mass participation in some rituals or mysteries or things. That's fine. No problem.

No problem. Very annoying. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that, but certainly this was a complaint about the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution that demystified the world in human existence and impoverished us by by demystifying it. And there was a whole sort of romantic movement which was a reaction against this. You know, Keith's complained that you know by by analyzing the rainbow into its constituent of colors with scientifically that it was sort of ruining the awe and beauty of the rainbow I have just the opposite feeling I mean the more I learn about science especially about biology the more in awe I am of everything around us because of its incredible intricacy and how surprising the path of evolution

has taken in some ways, you know, it could have gone one way, it went another way. I just find it absolutely fascinating. I think it goes hand in hand with your idea of our evolving flexible morality. I mean, can you think, I truly believe that we can look at the ecosystem in nature and solve a lot of our problems. Like, if you think about the way that running water flows, be it a teardrop or a waterfall, It takes the path of least resistance. And sometimes, if you think about a morning, think about a glacier that is touched by the first warm, golden hands of the sun, and a little bead begins to sweat. And it flows down the mountainside.

And then it stops. It's pooling because it hits a significant roadblock. Like that is us right now. We're that little bead of sweat that hit a little significant roadblock. And we need to be reinforced by the source. And that is the nature teaching us. And it's the same evolution you use in your book about the morality of mind evolving.

We're evolving. And I think we can learn from nature. Can you think of some other structures that may be analogous to the mind evolving that are outside the mind? You know, I mean, it's interesting to use that water metaphor because a book that I really admire is the title is like water on stone.

And it's a book about the United States movement. And, you know, there are a lot of people who are very skeptical about the human rights movement. They say, well, you know, the great powers like China, the United States or Russia, they can violate human rights in no consequences. And there are all these various problems. But the point of this metaphor like Waterham Stone

is that don't be impatient. Important changes usually take a lot of time. And the human rights culture is gradually eroding the authoritarian brutal regimes in the world, not all of them. And so, yeah, I think that the idea of evolutionary time

is fascinating because it's not on a human scale at all. And I think one of the reasons that some people reject evolution and embrace creationism is that they just can't grasp the magnitude of evolutionary time scale. We're used to think

in terms of two or three generations of humans or something. Okay. And so they say, well, how could the human eye and all its complexity have evolved? You know, well, look, if you start out with some single-celled organism and there's a mutation that causes a portion of its surface to be sensitive to light, well, then that means that if some big predator comes near it and blocks the light, it's going to have some indication that there's something there. Okay.

So maybe it gives it a little bit of a reproductive fitness advantage. And then there are further mutations. And over many, many eons where the life of the organism, the generation is very short compared to human being, right? So you can get more mutations much more quickly. Over millions and millions of years, billions of years, you end up with a human eye. It's just hard for most people to grasp that. And that's why, you know, I tend to think that there's been huge progress made in morality in the last 300 years, because it's been in the last 300 years that

you've gotten the idea that people are citizens, not subjects, they've gotten the idea of democracy, the rule of law, beginning of better treatment of animals and women, a better of, more rejection of racial hierarchies. And this is just like the blink of an eye in human history, There's 300 years nothing. So it just may take time. I think that we can accelerate the rate of progressive change, but for people just to throw up their hands and say things like, oh, for example, like that, you know, the European Union doesn't work.

Well, I'll tell you one thing. The European Union started out as the coal and steel union, and its express purpose was to link Germany and France together economically. So they wouldn't drag the world into another war. And it worked. If that's all it, it worked. It's fantastic. I, you know, clap, clap.

And people just, they want immediate gratification. They want a new institution to work perfectly immediately. They want moral progress to occur. And rapidly, by the way, when a progressive, valuable change occurs, it becomes invisible because we take it for granted. What we look at is what we don't have. I mean, the rule of law is a fantastic accomplishment, even when it's imperfectly implemented like it is almost everywhere. But people who live under the rule of law just take it for granted. They don't realize how entirely different human existence was through the vast stretch of human history when people didn't have the

protections of the rule of law. And I think, you know, that looking at history and thinking about evolution and as a process that takes a long time can make us more patient and more willing to stay committed to progressive change. That's how I would look at it. Yeah, it reminds me of what Jordan Peterson says. We're protected from something we can't see

from something we can't understand. And that's culture from chaos. You know, it's... I mean, when cultures are working, when societies are working, the way they work is invisible, and we take it for granted just like the air we breathe. And it's really quite an accomplishment.

You know, it's, I mean, human cooperation on a large scale is an incredible feat. And I think the fact that human beings have morality is crucial for that. But we take it for granted, you know. I mean, when people on the right say, you know, the government is the problem, not the solution. Well, that's true for some things. But my God, without the government, we'd be living in a state of complete savagery. and we wouldn't have enforcement of property rights, so we wouldn't have an economy. Yeah, it reminds me of John Dewey.

John Dewey said, the government is the shadow cast upon people by business. And it's so funny to me to hear some large corporations say, oh, the government wants to regulate everything. But they as employers want to regulate all their employees. Would the world be any better if corporations ran it? They would just become the new government. It's this fractal circle, you know. There's a book about this.

A philosopher in Arizona, Elizabeth Anderson wrote a book called Private Government, and she talks about the fact that in corporations, you have super authoritarian, anti-democratic rule over people in the major portion of their lives. Yeah. Well, can you talk about maybe some similarities and differences in morality in Ethiopia and Catalonia,

and Catalonia versus us over here in the United States? Oh, yeah, I think there are huge differences. I mean, Ethiopia, I can't claim to know a lot about it. I was there for a total of less than two weeks, and it was at the time where the Civil War was just ending, and the transitional government invited me and a bunch of other scholars to advise them on the writing of Constitution. And we kept asking to be able to go outside of Adizababa and see the country,

and they kept giving lame excuses why we couldn't. Well, it turned out they didn't control the rest of the country. There was a company out there, right? They were, you know, they controlled the area right around out of Sababa. And so I didn't really get, you know, before I went there, I read everything I could find on the history of Ethiopian, actually. But it was absolutely fascinating. But, you know, it was a sort of, I hope, an unrepresented time to look at Ethiopian culture

because it was they had highly solosities dictatorship then they had a Marxist dictatorship which was just horrible and then they had you know over a decade of multilateral civil war and the country was totally

devastated there was no social trust you know if you're at dinner and somebody said past the salt everybody's thinking what does he really want you know it was like total strategic thinking no trust everything was horrible but I found it to be a you know I think the Ethiopian people are among the most

physically beautiful people in the world they're they're tall those long neck chisel features sort of acoly moses those are wonderful blending of subterran African and Middle Eastern physical characteristics very dignified people Catalonia I think is really interesting because I I've written a lot on secession and on the justification of secession and I used to take a pretty dim view of the Catalan secession movement because I thought, well, look, they're not really suffering any major violations of human rights, you know, at the hands of the Spanish government, and why do they insist on independence? But when I've spent time there, I've come to think that

they're, first of all, that they have one good justification for secession, namely the Spanish government granted them a certain amount of autonomy, but then they, revoke the autonomy unilaterally, arbitrarily, and I think that's not good. But also, I think there's a different political culture in Catalonia than in many other parts of Spain, especially among political figures and the judiciary. I think that some members of the Spanish judiciary outside of Calonia are still sort of suffering under a Franco hangover. They're still sort of authoritarian and of course the Catalans were especially persecuted by Franco because Catalonia was one of the centers of the Republican movement and the

resistance against Franco when he toppled the Republic. And I think that it's not unreasonable for people in Catalonia to feel that given their political culture and their history they just don't fit in well in spain they really don't and but the spanish government has converted a lot of people in catalonia who would have wanted just some autonomy within the spanish state it's converted them into secessionists because it's been so brutal and so inflexible in listening to the demands of the catalans so i think i think the spanish government has shot itself with foot. I don't know if there's really going to be a successful succession. I tend to doubt it. At this point, it doesn't look like it's likely to happen. But, you know, it used to be that

there was a reason why states had to be big. They had to be big to have enough of a population to have an army big enough to protect them against invasions, right? And they also had to be big enough to have a good market because there were usually barriers, trade barriers, between countries. Well, now none of that's true in Europe. I mean, I think it's aside from Eastern Europe, where the Russians may be invading Lithuania after Ukraine. Aside from that, Western Europe, there's no need for big states in terms of security. You've got NATO, you've got other things, and you've got a completely open market. So there's no reason why you have to have big states. There's no reason why the historical shape of Spain has to stay the same.

the traditional reasons for having a big state don't apply anymore. So in principle, it looks like, you know, states devolving in the smaller states might make some sense. But there are problems. I think one of the things I worry about if Catalonia does the seed is that it's going to wreck the Spanish welfare state. Because Catalonia is very rich and it contributes a lot to the coffers of the central state, as does the Basque country, right? Those are the two of the richest areas in Spain. And if Catalonia secedes and then maybe the Bass secede

and maybe some other reasons to see, you're going to have sort of a case of the haves leaving the have-nots behind. And I don't think you'd be able to maintain decent welfare programs in the rest of Spain. You know, by the way, this has happened in American cities. There's been a kind of like quite secession where they do corporate entities. So they don't have to pay taxes to support people they don't like,

black people in particular. And this kind of a flight of the has and they have knots. And it could happen in Europe. I mean, you know, there's this, the Leganor, this group in northern Italy that claimed that they were racial. different from the southern Italians, Celtic, the other people were a lot of the people in the north were industrious and they were paying all these taxes to these lakes south.

They wanted to secede. And it didn't come off. Now they've changed their name. It's not the Lega Nord, it's just the Lega. And now they're just against all immigrants. They're not so much against the southern Italians. And they thought southern Italy began about 100 miles north of Rome, actually. They were very young. No,

Secession is a really interesting topic. And now, you know, people are talking about secession in the United States, about the red states seceding from the blue states. A national divorce. Yeah. Well, it didn't work very well last time. It didn't work very well. Dr. I have a lot more questions and I'm enjoying the conversation, but I want to be mindful of your time. If you have something to go or somewhere to go, we could set up another day or we could end it here, or we could continue to engage the people.

What I would say, I do have to go in a minute, but what I would suggest is, if you want to talk about changing human nature and human enhancement. Yeah, I would love to. I've written two books on that. One is called Better Than Human. It's the more accessible one. You might have a look at and decide where you have a session on that. Sure.

But also, you know, I think, I think secession is a pretty interesting topic. and it's becoming more interesting. So I'm open. I really enjoyed this. It's great fun. Me too. This was a lot of fun. Thank you for doing this.

And I'll reach out to you after I'll email you and we'll set some more up. This is, I really enjoyed the book. And I think to anybody and everybody listening and or watching, I want to tell you to go out and get this book. It'll blow your mind. It's not like any philosophy book you've read it. is it's engaging, it's a history book, it's a book about our future, and it's really well written, and the ideas are packed, and they're fun to think about, and I think it'll make you a better person if you read it.

Boy, you should be my agent. You're fantastic. It's really good, doctor. I will be mindful of your time, and I'll reach out to you. Thank you very much for your time. I had a great time, and we'll talk again soon. Thank you. Great. Thanks so much. Okay. Okay, bye-bye. Now I'm ready. Let's see what you got. Whoa! Nice one.