The time has come to step back from the brink of political advocacy. The purpose of this book is not to invent a new ideology, but to explain how a human functions. We cannot do this without explaining what a belief is, why we have them and how they work. It is an inevitable consequence of their structure that they become destructive to their believers. That humanity is on a self-destructive path is not a new observation, but perhaps it is a new idea to explain why this is so hard to avoid. We need the sharp realisation of where our nature has led us to act as a catalyst for ideological renewal. So, let me now sum up the entirety of this book.
That humans have emotions isn’t proof that we are not machines – the emotions are the machinery. In higher vertebrates, they are primary action drivers. If a chimpanzee didn’t have emotions, it would slump in a blob until maggots (that don’t have emotions) reduced it to crumbling bones. Emotions in a chimpanzee are products of evolution by natural selection. They drive survival-enhancing actions, and should be regarded as biological phenomena by scientists – including psychologists.
Attempting to understand human nature is one of our oldest enquiries. Since the Age of Enlightenment, it has been symbolically split between the views of Hobbes and Rousseau. Both lived before Darwin, but Rousseau was probably acquainted with the idea of evolution because one of his contemporaries, Georges-Louis Leclerc, was the first to propose it as a scientific hypothesis. Leclerc’s descriptions of the great apes likely influenced Rousseau’s idea of primitive man. Rousseau would have been fascinated by Darwinian theory had it been around in his day. But I suspect that Hobbes would have regarded it as heresy.319
The debate about whether humans are fundamentally good or fundamentally bad has raged ever since we first came up with a concept of a human nature. Evolutionary theory now permits us to answer this question. Kinship theory and theories of reciprocity enable us to describe the evolution of altruism. We can study this in chimpanzees, and can compare the results with Rousseau’s conception of a primitive man. What we find is that the moral emotions (pity, sympathy, guilt, gratitude, etc.) are a product of evolution by natural selection and seem to operate in chimpanzees in the way that Rousseau would have us believe. When Rousseau argues that primitive man was peaceable, he is saying that our fundamental nature grants us the ability and the desire to cooperate. And he is right!
Altruism only works if we have mechanisms for detecting cheaters who do not reciprocate. Anger therefore is a product of evolution by natural selection and we can see it directed at cheaters in chimpanzees. The Darwinian theories of parental investment and sexual selection also demonstrate that humiliation and its violent response is a product of natural selection; so too is the emotion of jealousy. When Hobbes argues that without the Leviathan of the state to intervene we would be constantly in a state of “warre as of every man against every man”, he is saying that anger and our response to humiliation is central to our nature, and the chain of humiliation and violent retaliation is never-ending. And he is right!
Hobbes and Rousseau are both right about human nature, but they are each only looking at that part of human nature that suits their political theories.
Consciousness isn’t understood by either scientists or philosophers. However, it is clearly a mechanism whereby an animal self-reviews. That is a problem because self-referencing in a mechanism is a prerequisite to circular causality. It isn’t clear that this can happen in a chimpanzee, but it certainly does in humans. Language is unique to humans; so is the ability to contemplate future emotions and fluently deploy tactical deception with emotional behaviour. We can think about thinking, and we can understand that affecting emotional behaviour impacts upon the thinking of others – Rousseau’s Pitié. Thereby, we can alter their responses towards us in ways that benefit us. However, such benefits are only short term. Eventually, this tactical deception alters how the emotion functions. The emotion was supposed to drive a survival enhancing action but no longer does so, and the gradual slide into self-destruction begins.
The ability to impersonate our own behaviour is the critical self-referencing mechanism that leads to circular causality in humans. A word for an emotion indirectly references the cause of the behaviour associated with that emotion. However, when we affect that behaviour, the cause is no longer a biological emotion, but the reason for the affectation. Humans modify their behaviour to demonstrate their compliance with the cultural group to which they identify, and this establishes a vortex that gradually gathers momentum: the culture causes the emotional behaviour; the meaning of the word for the emotion references the cause of the behaviour, i.e. the culture. It is irrefutable to people caught in this vortex that the culture causes emotional outcomes. If this outcome is bad, the feedback loop breaks. If it is good, then a belief is born. The belief exists because of circular causality of which the believer has no awareness. Logically, all beliefs are tautologies that the believer cannot escape – they are irrefutable thoughts. The pressure to modify behaviour to demonstrate compliance with the belief becomes stronger, and for entire societies a biological emotion no longer drives a survival-enhancing action. Self-destruction becomes a mass phenomenon, as the belief increasingly becomes destructive to the people who believe it. What I hope I have demonstrated is that all forms of belief in work this way. Bin Laden was in such a trap, and so was Hitler. Every Indian who thinks he needs more children is in such a trap, and so is every American who can only live with a massive carbon footprint. It is logical to believe in a fictitious religion. Once you understand its ingredients, inventing one is as easy as baking a cake. This is a form of reductio ad absurdum proof. But, So What? The problem isn’t that you are a fool to fall into such a trap, but that falling into a trap of some form is practically unavoidable. Belief in a religion is fundamentally the same as a belief in a theory of economics. The acceptance of this is the conceptual leap that should result in you being tolerant of every believer, but tolerant of no belief.
A morality is a particular form of belief – a code of how humans should act to benefit humanity collectively. A morality for the twenty-first century must start with evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory gives us the human base case – a scientific version of the unified primitive man as conceived by Hobbes and Rousseau. This is a vision of man before we formed our self-image by gazing into the twisted mirror of pretended emotions.
I have demonstrated that the distinction between a moral emotion and a moral belief only exists when the moral emotion is suppressed or affected for a given set of stimuli. We can be agnostic with regard to moral beliefs and still be moral – perhaps this is the reason why secular societies have less crime, corruption and warfare than religious ones. This realisation enables us to look at morality with fresh scientific eyes. It becomes meaningful to ask ourselves the question, as scientists: if we had a human whose emotions were untainted by ideology, how would that person react? If we can answer this, then scientific humanism can define a human nature from which we can derive an ideology of human survival, not human wellbeing.
The moral implications of Rousseau are quite easy to deduce. Like Rousseau (and Mencius two millennia beforehand), we should trust our moral emotions because they are a deep part of our nature. These emotions drive us to be cooperative and altruistic. Rousseau and Mencius are right that listening to our moral emotions will lead us to the right path. But how can we listen to them when we are bombarded by the continuous tactical manipulation of these emotions to gain short-term advantage? The only thing that I can add to Rousseau and Mencius is that any short-term tactical gain by affecting or suppressing a moral emotion will almost certainly become self-destructive in the long term.
More complex is the reconciliation of Hobbes’ analysis of our violence, evolutionary theory and its moral implications. Firstly, we should recognise that humiliation will always have a violent response. We are wired this way. Biological humiliation is caused by threats to biological fitness, and the retaliation is directed at the source of the threat. The suppression or mythologising of humiliation does not suppress or prompt the violent response, but misdirects it. Hitler suppressed the humiliation caused by his father and Germans suppressed the humiliation caused by the naval blockade, and the response was misdirected at anybody who was remotely the target of discrimination. The moral implication here is that humiliating others is the most underrated sin because its chain of adverse consequences is so long and unpredictable. However, it is the manipulation of the humiliation that causes the violence to become uncontrolled. We should therefore be extremely wary of anybody who suppresses or mythologises humiliation. However, such disinformation is a central plank of propaganda: Jews had their own mythology of humiliation before the Holocaust (the escape from Egypt), and Americans who think that 9/11 was unprovoked are reading a version of history in which all genocide of Muslims by Christians has been wiped off the ledger.320 9/11 did not “change everything” as the tired cliché says, because Christians and Muslims have been at war for a millennium and only pause when they need to rearm with a fresh excuse. The only way to break this cycle is to gain an understanding of the nature of the beliefs involved.
Hobbes is correct that we need the Leviathan of the state to keep us at peace with one another. The state needs to have a monopoly on the right to violent retaliation. But what Hobbes did not envisage is that the state has become the principal humiliator. Totalitarian states humiliate their own people, but this tendency is becoming increasingly prevalent in countries that pride themselves on their rule of law: strip-searching by the police and oppressive incarceration policies; or exporting humiliation, through blockades, or trade with countries that enslave their industrial workers. Humiliation has been the weapon of choice of superpowers for centuries. This must cease.
The only way to diffuse past humiliation is to apologise. Germany has done a substantially unqualified mea culpa for the Holocaust, but Japan’s apology for the atrocities it committed in Asia during the same period has been weak and qualified. However, the winners of wars never apologise. Had Britain apologised for the naval blockade of Germany, the Holocaust might not have happened. Had America apologised for all the depleted uranium that they sowed across Iraq, 9/11 might not have happened.
The next Holocaust will occur when the political kitsch of a country becomes insufficient to cover up the shit that is being denied. People will have a destructive irrefutable thought. And someone will mythologise the cause of the destruction, and the anger and revenge will escalate in an unpredictable direction.
Let us review the principle objective of this book: to demonstrate that a human is a robustly logical computational device. What I have demonstrated is that if we make this assumption, we can still account for most of the craziness of human nature. This of course doesn’t prove the case, it merely makes it a highly plausible hypothesis. But let us consider the alternative hypothesis. Most prior theory has said that because a person can perform a self-destructive action, that they are capable of “irrationality”. In effect this is saying that because the output of human thinking can go awry, that there must be something wrong with the brain’s processing. I am simply suggesting that the brain’s processing is working just fine, and all the problems with the output are due to problems with the input. This is a garbage-in-garbage-out argument that any computer scientist should greet with a shrug. I have demonstrated that self-destructive actions are rational. Human actions are generally dependent upon beliefs, but beliefs are logical because they all take the form of logical tautologies. There remain some holes in my argument, but I’ll leave you to search for them and, hopefully, you won’t work them out before I fill them with my future work.
Can you accept that you are a robustly logical computational device? If that is all you are, then your life has no point. The origin of beliefs is the need for people to invent a point. It shouldn’t need to be said that an atheist can have religious tolerance, but many atheists mock religious belief without having a point of their own. I don’t have any prescriptive formula of how humans should live. I love their extraordinary diversity – including all the bizarre things that they believe, and all their elaborate rituals and cultures. People will always need to create purpose for their lives, but the only way to do this is by mythologising emotional states.
Think about what makes you You! Your emotions are genetically determined and are your primary action drivers, but each of these drivers has been bent. In each circumstance where you have to calculate a course of action, the emotions that drive your decision have been distorted by thousands of behavioural manipulations. There are thousands of such circumstances, so in total what makes you You are millions of such manipulations. You are the product of every time your mother hugged you when she really wanted to strangle you, and every time your lover screamed abuse at you when he or she was frightened that you would leave. To understand the algorithm by which you calculate your actions, you would have to build a giant database of every single one of these manipulations starting from when you first became aware of your own and other people’s behaviour. And then you would have to build a powerful computer to work out how each emotion is bent in each circumstance so that you can run the algorithm that calculates your actions. But you don’t need to build this computer because it already exists, and it resides in your skull. The database of your behavioural environment exists too, but you can only access it through the hazy and inaccurate processes of introspection and memory. And there is, as yet, no way to examine the software.
You are a self-referencing biological machine. Your self-review triggers the question “why?” Without a purpose, your life has no meaning; so you invent a purpose. And the only way to do this is to modify your behaviour to create an emotional outcome for your life to aim at.