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PHILOSOPHY THE DUAL NATURE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOURTony Wilson, Member, on 6 January 2004 Summary Dual nature theory is a unified theory of our behaviour combining ethics with political philosophy. Moreover it is an evolutionary theory of morality. It shows that individual and group behaviour are totally different; you must take them apart before you can understand how they have been evolved. The theory thus explains morality as a propensity for adjustable rules of selective self-restraint, and group behaviour as an essential and evolved part of our nature, which is crucial in the evolutionary selection of our fitness and totally amoral but readily controlled by law. The main arguments of the theory are well established philosophically and scientifically. They just haven’t been put together properly. Dual nature theory No animal can survive if it is not motivated to eat and to avoid pain and discomfort. Nor, because all individuals eventually die, can it avoid extinction if it is not motivated to reproduce. Pain and pleasure are opposite sides of the same coin. This is the selfish prime motivator of all life. This universal prime motivator is evolutionarily ancient. It is very powerful and all animals seek to obey it as the guiding principle of their lives. Life just exploits opportunities. It does not evolve with any direction or objective; it just floods forwards like water which, when poured onto dry land, takes the best direction downhill that opportunity offers. Thus evolution works to exploit an opportunity; an evolutionary niche. Light is the pre-existing opportunity which nature has exploited by evolving eyes. Sound waves are the opportunity which allowed the evolution of hearing and speech. And the fact that the air is dense is the opportunity which allowed flight to evolve. The same is true of cooperation. The pre-existing fact that many survival tasks, like foraging, sheltering and breeding can be performed more efficiently by team work than singly is the opportunity which engendered cooperation. But there’s an obstacle in the way. The very essence of cooperation is unselfish behaviour, but unfortunately the selfish prime motivator which is essential to all life stands massively in opposition to the evolution of cooperation. Selfishness, greed and fear will always destroy any cooperative venture. Teamwork requires the suppression of the selfish prime motivator Nevertheless different species in most classes of animal have evolved various forms of cooperation. How is it done? Gene thinking and game theory are put forward by geneticists a as the explanation of cooperation (altruism). But they are not the answer, they merely show by computer modelling that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in a social animal. They do not show how it arises in a previously solitary species. Gene thinking in this context contains a monstrous circular argument which can be paraphrased as follows: ‘Cooperation is difficult to achieve but it brings significant life style advantages, the essence of society is cooperation and social animals will cooperate’. This is much the same as saying flying animals fly; it proves nothing. The essence of dual nature theory is that cooperation is achieved by the use of an evolved predisposition, or propensity to suppress the prime motivator when appropriate. This propensity is something like our ability for language. We are not born with a language, ready-made like fingers and toes. Instead we are born with a propensity to learn and speak any language. Similarly we are born with a genetically evolved propensity to learn and obey any rules of self-restraint. A classic example of propensity as the basis of language learning is shown in experiments on american white crowned sparrows carried out by Mazukazu Konishi and others in the early 1960s. They showed how male birds defend territory and advertise their species membership and sexual maturity by song. But this song must be learnt in infancy by listening to mature males. If this is denied the sparrow cannot sing properly and is unable to attract a mate. This propensity is for any rules. The rules of self-restraint have to be flexible. They must also be applied selectively, which is not the same thing. Though habitual cowardice disqualifies one from a hunting team, unthinking bravery can mean injury or death. At every turn there is a decision to be made. I call this is the ‘cooperate or split dilemma’. This dilemma is resolved by propensity in the following way. I’m talking about all cooperating vertebrates here, not just humans. As youngsters mature they are taught ‘good’ behaviour by their parents, this is then modified in play and social experiment. Thus they build up their own personal instant reference library for social behaviour, and the cooperate or split dilemma is resolved intuitively and pragmatically. So this dilemma is no problem to cooperating animals. Individuals will sometimes get it wrong, but genetic propensity and education ensure that the working team functions adequately; members selectively over-riding their prime motivators in well ordered harmony to get the job done. In this way they are able to judge when it’s best either to support the team at the risk of injury by cooperating, or to avoid injury at the risk of team breakdown by splitting. Uniquely among animals, humans obsessively discuss this still small voice from the library of selective self-restraint. We call it morality. It tantalises us for two reasons. First we believe it will yield an understanding of its principles to pure philosophical analysis, which we delight in for its own sake. And second we believe morality, when we understand it, will be an absolute and pre-existing principle, like God, which will be the basis for universal fixed codes of behaviour, and law, for all peoples at all times. But these beliefs, unfortunately, turn out to be untrue. They are wishful thinking. And worse; as I will explain they legitimise totalitarianism. Dual nature theory shows that morality is merely flexible behaviour enabled by a genetic propensity to obey adjustable rules. It cannot be an eternal principle as Plato believed. Furthermore ethics has evidently failed as the basis for international law because effectively we have none. We still have no international law that can resolve what I call the Big Depressing Question. We have to face the fact that we are an animal which massively kills its own species and other animals, which pollutes the air, land and sea and which routinely destroys its own and other animals’ living habitats. An animal that behaves like this can only be described as viciously nasty and destructive. But why do we go on doing it when we all know it is wrong? That’s the Big Depressing Question. The answer I believe lies in the dual nature of our behaviour. On the one hand we behave as individual members of teams or groups, and on the other as the teams themselves. As individuals we behave with selective self-restraint, our propensity to obey the small still voice of morality is what enables team-work. But our teams themselves recognise no such restraint. A cooperating group of humans behaves just like a quasi-living organism, with a quasi-mind of its own. Consider a manufacturing company. Like an amoeba it has a nucleus and nervous system in it’s leadership hierarchy. It has a skin or boundary in its finite membership. And it acts with a purpose to do things. A cooperating group has a General Will, it is self-aware and has moods. The General Will is independent of the will of its leader. A colony of soldier ants can be studied as a single quasi-living organism. This applies in varying degrees to all cooperating animals; when cooperating they all behave like discrete organisms. Quite a lot of understanding can be gained by examining them as discrete organisms and analysing their behaviour as such. The observation that tribes or teams appear to be amoral is confirmed by the logic of evolution. The tribe that behaves morally will quickly lose out when the fittest are being selected. The point here is that for a cooperating animal membership of the fittest group is a major element of individual fitness in the survival game. Better genetically / reproductively to be an average member of the fittest tribe than the fittest member of an average tribe. Thus to a certain extent the group becomes the unit of selection. When the principle of natural selection has been distilled to its purest statement there can be no provision for self-restraint. Groups are completely amoral. We are all familiar with the processes in which team behaviour effortlessly over rides individual scruples. People call it locker-room banter, gang mentality or laddishness. I call it the seduction of morality. Winning, success and prosperity is all, and a team member whose conscience gets in the way will always get bullied back into place or expelled. That even includes the leader. When it’s under serious pressure the group never behaves in a brave or obedient way, unless forced to do so, or unless doing so is in its own selfish interest. Dual nature theory shows that the Big Depressing Question about our bad behaviour is a trick question. Our groups don’t behave ‘badly’ at all because ‘bad’ is an individual concept. Our cruel, polluting, habitat wrecking behaviour is group behaviour. It is completely natural, and much easier to understand – much less of a behavioural mystery - than our selectively self-restrained ‘good’ behaviour. Group behaviour is readily controlled by laws. This is because effective laws are simply recognised as external constraints which are part of the jungle the group operates in. It goes without saying that this only works so long as these laws are seen to be adequately effective. The trinity principle How do living organisms go about their daily business of finding food, sheltering and reproducing? I suggest that the navigation systems of all moving life forms consist of a three-phase never-ending cycle in which each phase determines the next. This is like the children’s game in which scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone and stone blunts scissors. The phases of animal navigation are Review, Decide and Remember. For example a tiger reviews life and finds it is cold and wet. It decides to shelter. It remembers the experience for next time. This trinity principle has a nice triangular geometry and logic which is pre-existing in the Socratic sense; like the pre-existing fact that 2+2=4. There are never less than three steps. The organism cannot navigate if it does not complete all three. Two won’t do. It is no good reviewing the situation and deciding what to do, if you do not remember and learn from the result. That is not navigation. Nor is deciding what to do and remembering the result, if you do not then take stock of your new situation. Also no fourth step is required. Three is enough. A fourth would probably be hopelessly confusing. It would introduce the chaotic possibility of alternative pathways in the iteration. These phases are mutually controlling; Review motivates and instructs Decide, Decide feeds and compiles Remember, and Remember controls and constrains Review. If you were designing a family of cooperating robots you would have to give them each a navigational system. I predict that it would cycle through mutually dominant and constantly reiterating phases. And I further predict that there would be three of these phases, not two or four. I am proposing that from the very beginning, life on earth has made use of this bit of pre-existing triangular geometry for navigation. In other words that this geometry is simply another behavioural opportunity provided by the environment; even more basic than the opportunities offered by light waves, sound waves and air density, and of course cooperation. This principle even applies to quasi-living organisms like business, quangos and governments. It applies literally to individual living organisms and metaphorically to groups. So I’m saying that the trinity principle underlies the navigation, more normally called management, of all human groups. It may be particularly useful in managing armies, churches, universities, government departments and multinational corporations. Business schools please take note! Every nation’s political constitution should apply the trinity principle in balancing its powers as follows: Review,(which engenders Decide) should be represented by the media who are commercially motivated to express the true spirit, the gossip and will of the people in order to sell advertising. Decide (which compiles and modifies Remember) should be represented by government, which harnesses the most capable leaders; the ones who can never be prevented from climbing their way to the top of the heap in any society. Remember (which controls and circumscribes Review) should be represented by culture and it’s everyday embodiment; the law. These three elements, media, government and law, should be so balanced that any two can combine to over-ride the third. And finally the continual iteration of the cycle should be enshrined as sacrosanct. The history of social philosophy Dual nature theory offers two main conclusions; first that there can never be any fixed rules of morality; these must always be flexible. And second that all groups are naturally amoral. These conclusions do challenge a few of our traditional beliefs, so I will now sketch out, very briefly, how the theory applies to the history of western social philosophy. We have three interchanging modes of behaviour; as private individuals; as cooperating individuals, and as groups. We can pick out the three great branches of social philosophy which correspond to these modes. For private individuals wanting, for whatever pessimistic or disaffected reason, an answer to how to live without being dependent on anyone else, there is a big and respected set of consolation philosophies. These include Epicureanism, Hedonism Cynicism and Stoicism. They also include modern Zen Buddhism and Existentialism. Being for private individuals, this first great branch of social philosophy is peripheral to dual nature theory. For cooperating individuals there is a series of cooperator philosophies. These are principally codes of morality which advise on how to behave as members of groups. They include Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Political Correctness, now growing spontaneously to fill the vacuum left by the demise of Christianity, may yet develop into a new cooperator philosophy for the industrial age. For the control of groups, which include kingdoms, churches and big business corporations, there is vast body of political philosophy. This includes divine kings, secular kings, the social contract, democracy, utilitarianism, communism, fascism, social democracy and business management theory. All social philosophies can be put into one or more of these three categories. We can now trace the development of these three branches of philosophy through history. History distinguishes three main stages of social development. These are hunter/gatherer, agricultural/city and industrial. I don’t know enough about the hundreds of philosophies of hunter/gatherer societies to distinguish the three branches of social philosophy. We just seem to identify shadowy cartoon figures of shamanism, witch-doctors, ancestor worship, tribal gods and so on. But I am sure the three branches (consolation, cooperator and political) were represented, and that they were well suited to the hunter/gatherer life-style. Furthermore it is highly likely that certain tribes recognised the dual nature of human social behaviour; it is so obvious. Witch doctors would still be adequate today if humans hadn’t developed agriculture, cities and writing. This was the next stage of social development, and from the earliest writing on social philosophy we can identify traces of the three great branches. Furthermore, though the dual nature of human behaviour was not promoted, it was there under the surface in the ancient Greek Sophists and in Aristotle; they clearly understood the selectiveness required when applying the rules of self-restraint; in other words of morality. But Socrates and Plato led us badly astray with the idea that morality, when we can find it, will turn out to be an absolute. This false prediction had the huge political advantage that it favoured the ruling class and the church. It enabled the weaving of an authoritarian spell which conferred a spurious authority on the Jewish, Christian and Islamic churches and on the kings who sponsored these religions. Christianity overshadowed all three branches of European social philosophy from 350 AD until the renaissance. As the industrial revolution develops science finally loosens the grip of christianity and the three great branches of social philosophy become inadequate. Philosophically speaking we are confused. First, the private, consolation philosophies like stoicism and existentialism, do survive intact it is true, but they never were very useful because we are above all a cooperating, not a solitary animal. Second, the dogmas, mysteries and absolutism of the cooperator philosophies which underlie our Jewish, Christian and Islamic cultures are now clearly absurd. And third, our political philosophy is pathetically incapable of answering the Big Depressing Question. I blame Plato. As we enter the electronic age we need to freshen up the three great branches of social philosophy. What next? Having survived the convulsions of Fascism and Communism, the Western World is finally settling into Social Democracy. But nothing is ever final; any historical review raises the question ‘ What’s going to happen next?’ Both Fascism and Communism were extremely authoritarian. This suggests that historically speaking Social Democracy is further over to the humanitarian left on the political spectrum than we normally appreciate. This position is grossly wasteful of human and material resources, and is worryingly dependent on perpetual economic growth. We must accept that these are serious flaws. We can absorb them for the moment because of the amazing achievements of science and technology, but it can’t go on forever. One day western industrial growth must slow down. When that happens we could be outstripped and over-run by hard-working people, who, starting from behind and growing faster, could swarm all over us. Hard men came swooping down from the hills to conquer ancient Rome; it could easily happen again. A society under threat like this ought to shift over a little, not too far, towards the autocratic right. The hard men in their turn, when they have taken over the soft people of the plains, should ease their belts a little and move over slightly to the liberal left, but again not too far. I suggest that societies might one day learn to control their dialectical oscillations. I imagine those computer games in which you steer a virtual car round a virtual racetrack. The aim, possibly utopian, would be to navigate through the appropriate mid-channels instead of lurching between the extremes of political philosophy. By mid-channels I mean those positions on the left/right political spectrum which best suit their internal culture, and their foreign policy as to peace, external threat, growth or stagnation, and technological change. This is Aristotle’s golden mean. It would require an almost religious understanding of the true nature of cooperation. This could be developed out of Political Correctness The trinity principle could be useful for this navigation. Finally we do have to admit that we are still incapable of answering the Big Depressing Question. We cannot control the bad behaviour of groups; we can’t stop terrorism, or the anti-social behaviour of multinational corporations and we seem unable to prevent wars, pollution and habitat destruction. Now that globalisation is arriving on the wings of the internet we must act fast to adopt a set of beliefs and codes which will prevent us from blowing ourselves up and poisoning the earth. A good step forward would be to understand the dual nature of human behaviour, and absorb its implications into our political philosophy in order to control the amorality of group behaviour. Conclusions
Ignoring for a moment the biological and philosophical arguments for dual nature theory, I claim that the very width of the scope of these social insights and proposals show that it makes sense. Tony Wilson, |
