With Russ Roberts. An excerpt:
if you expand the moral domain as I did and you are interested in group loyalty and respect for authority and the idea of making things sacred, boy, these things don’t make a lot of sense from reciprocal altruism. But they make perfect sense if you think about tribes competing with other tribes. And if you think as Darwin did that group cohesion matters when you have intergroup competition. So, what I’m saying here is that almost all human nature can be explained without group selection. We are 90% chimps. Chimps are not really group-selected. So, as Frans de Waal says, all the building blocks of human morality can be found in chimps. And I think almost all can. So that’s the 90% chimp. But I think that, beginning with Homo heidelbergensis, which is about 800,000 years ago, beginning with that species, which is thought first to tame fire, have campsites, hunt large game cooperatively, bring it back to the campsite, butcher it–well, this group probably also, they had spears. They probably also were engaged in intergroup conflict. And it’s this species that also begins to have cumulative cultural evolutions–the first signs of culture building on previous innovations. So, that I think was our Rubicon–Homo heidelbergensis, 800-500,000 years ago. So that opens up the possibility of true group selection aided by gene culture co-evolution. Now, bees are group selected. The bee doesn’t live or die based on its ability to outcompete other bees. Bees live and die based on the hive’s ability to prevail over other hives. So that’s what I mean by we are 10% bee.
Russ chimes in:
one of the things I think libertarians sometimes miss, which is our desire to be part of something larger than our self. I think the Left romanticizes, say, our democracy or political process and takes away some of the realities of it to make it look more appealing than it actually is. But I think libertarians have no ability, almost no ability, to even appreciate the idea of the body politic or collective decision-making. And I understand the harm of it, the dangers of it. But it seems to be an important part of our humanity in lots of ways. And for some people, their political persuasion is their religion; for other people, their sports is their religion; and for some folks, their literal religion is their religion.
Russ and I are both fans of Haidt’s work. See this review essay, where I stirred Haidt’s ideas around, ultimately leading to my e-book.
I recognize the value of group selection, but I don’t believe that group behavior is altruistic. That is, in any given human group there is a social structure which is hierarchical. Status is very important. Not everyone must sacrifice, and a privileged few are the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of many others. So, I don’t see libertarians as being opposed to group behavior (i.e., collective decision making) per se. Rather, they are opposed to the real social structures they perceive (as opposed to the idealized social structures they are taught to have faith in), which include a great many calls for sacrifice on their part and a great many unearned privileges taken by those with higher status.
Civil society, made up of voluntary associations of people who share common interests, values, or beliefs, offers people the opportunity to be part of “something larger than themselves” without having to force collective decisions on anyone, since each person is free to disassociate and go off and form a competing organization if they found themselves dissatisfied. There was a chap named Alexis de Tocqueville who described this as one of the best qualities of the United States.
My sense is that it has been seriously eroded over the past century or so, in favor of the kind of flawed, dangerous collective decision-making (ie, politics) Russ discusses. I do not think this represents progress, and I don’t think any polite talk about how this is “an important part of our humanity” is helpful. I suspect that forcing collective decisions on the unwilling is actually part of the appeal; it’s a chance to brandish your position in the social hierarchy against those lower down the totem pole. In other words, both the bee brain and the chimp brain are getting quite a buzz out of politicizing and collectivizing every aspect of American life. Yuck.
The problem I have with Haidt is can’t you morally justify just about anything in terms of promoting group cohesion? If the moral line is no longer whether something harms the individual but whether it promotes the group then that opens the door for all sorts of atrocities. As best I can tell Haidt is silent on this issue.
This is interesting. Can you use the claim of group cohesion to get people to do irrational things just to signal group unity. Cults, hazings, sports teams, not to mention political parties seem to indicate yes.
Maybe once everything is zero sum libertarianism is the next evolutionary advance.
The problem is the nomenclature. Libertarianism has become synonymous, in the public eye at least, for either Ayn Rand style Objectivism or some form of anarcho capitalism.
Interestingly this doesn’t describe many libertarians, nor does it describe the vast majority of politicians that are identified as libertarian. The Pauls are too nationalistic and traditionally moralistic to be this particular caricature, the same with Justin Amash. The Libertarian Party I was involved in the early nineties was riven by factions but the popular strawman idea of a libertarian was never a majority in either Texas or Minnesota where I dealt with it.
What do we call these people and their ideologies?
People should stop being idiots. Not only do I not have to reject movement libertarians because of randians or anarchos, I can even pick ideas I like from those subgroups. But since people will continue to be irrational we have to deal somehow. Maybe we popularize a libertarian spectrum menu.
Another point is that from an evolutionary perspective Haidt is wrong. Chimpanzees live in family bands, they are intensely social, they have even been known to wage territorial warfare and cooperate in both hunting and food distribution. Our second nearest relatives, the Gorillas are also intensely social. The only antisocial great ape is the poorly understood Orangoutang, who is capable of considerable social behavior. The large old world monkeys have many highly social species as well.
Claiming this starts at only 800kya is only because that is as far back as we can basically prove human social structure. It is the rare physical anthropologist who would not suspect that sociability doesn’t go back at least as far back as our nearest shared hominid/ape ancestor.
What libertarians can do is disaggregate. Others can’t turn it off. If they don’t have a team, they’ll make believe one.
Beavers cooperate to build dams, and it looks a lot like a specialized assembly line.
Bees aren’t group-selected. They’re kin-selected, like naked mole rats.
A hive consists of a queen and her sterile children, who help their genes survive into the next generation through her. They’re not in genetic competition with each other – otherwise they could gain a relative advantage by sabotaging each other (group selection is slower than individual selection, since an individual’s traits get averaged out into the group performance and so there’s less selection pressure.)