(It's a good time to be thinking deeper - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
"the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly"
If anyone managed to come away from Part I: Humans: not just selfish with an overly sentimental view of human nature, this post will rob you of that delusion. Yes, we humans have a remarkably developed faculty for cooperation and group-oriented behavior, in comparison to most other species. That's an encouraging thing to know. And it may even become useful, if you start to identify the conditions that tend to set us up for cooperation. However, as Charles Darwin, David Sloan Wilson, and many others have suggested, the processes of group selection that helped us evolve to be cooperative within our groups probably also encouraged competition (to put it mildly) between groups.
Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson explain in their book, Unto Others:
...our goal ... is not to paint a rosy picture of universal benevolence. Group selection does provide a setting in which helping behavior directed at members of one's own group can evolve; however, it equally provides a context in which hurting individuals in other groups can be selectively advantageous. Group selection favors within-group niceness and between-group nastiness. Group selection theory does not abandon the idea of competition that forms the core of the theory of natural selection...
And here's Wilson again in The New Fable of the Bees: Multilevel Selection, Adaptive Societies, and the Concept of Self Interest:
[Multilevel selection theory] has the capacity to explain the behavior of individuals who demonically work to undermine their groups (within-group selection), individuals who angelically work on behalf of their groups (the bright side of among-group selection) and avenging angels who work on behalf of their groups to destroy other groups (the dark side of among-group selection). We might not like the dark sides of animal and human nature, but they exist and require a theory to explain them. ...multilevel selection theory has the potential to explain the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.
Why do you build me up, buttercup, just to let me down and mess me around? Seriously though, this just underscores that the purpose of this series is to use the lens of evolutionary theory not to idealize but to examine and better understand how humans and groups work, particularly in relation to collective action - and hopefully make practical use of that understanding.
Stephen Colbert's much-publicized March to Keep Fear Alive tomorrow-and his whole schtick really-may be making a far greater political impact than you consciously realize. I'm no neuroscientist, but I might even argue that the faux right-wing pundit is physically altering the very structure of your brain.
Such an outlandish allegation requires a little set-up. Ready for an adventure into the political brain?
Let's start with rats.
In a brilliant Radiolab episode called Memory and Forgetting (I highly recommend listening to the first 21 minutes here), hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich discuss a memory experiment with rats. They play an audio tone for a rat, just before giving it a slight electrical shock. Predictably, the next time the tone is played, the rat reacts. Here's Jad:
The moment it hears the tone and then feels the shock, inside its head a bunch of neurons start to build a connection... Memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another. So the next time that the rat hears that damn tone, since inside its brain tone brain cells are physically connected to shock brain cells, it's gonna know that after this [tone sound plays] comes this [shock sound effect plays]. Instead of just listening passively, it's gonna freeze, bracing itself for what is about to happen.
Ok, duh, but here's a little more about how it happens physically inside the brain. Memory is "a physical thing," explains regular Radiolab contributor Jonah Leher (author of the book How We Decide), "It's not simply an idea. It's a physical trace left in your brain. [A trace made largely of] proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of memory."
Neuroscientists figured this out through experiments with the drug anisomycin, which inhibits the formation of new proteins. They found that without new proteins there can be no new memory. So when they repeated the experiment but this time gave the rats anisomycin as they played the tone (right before the shock), these rats did not react to the tone afterward. They could not learn a correlation between tone and shock, because they could not form proteins to make this experience into a memory.
It seems like everywhere you look these days, someone's trying to spread...The Fear.
All around us...in every town...on every corner...a massive Army Of Fear is standing by, according to the Messengers, ready at a moment's notice to obey the dictates of some unappointed Czar or another.
Just ask Glenn Beck: concentration camps for the white people, jackbooted stormtroopers ready to snatch the guns from your cold dead fingers...Socialist Government-Controlled Healthcare That Threatens Your Not Socialist Medicare...it's all coming, my friends-and unless we organize, as a community, to return to the values of the Founding Fathers, The Government, meaning that awful Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and George Soros and all the other Evil Community Organizers, will win.
There's no government, we're told, like no government.
You know who would find all of this fear of self-government just entirely bizarre?
The Founding Fathers.
In today's conversation we'll consider the fundamentals of American patriotism, we'll ask one of those Founding Fathers how he saw the role of Government-and we'll toss in a few words from Abraham Lincoln, just for good measure.
Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the sounds and images on our television sets, and the heroism of so many men and women. Three numbers that framed the events of the last decade and seemed like they would define my generation.
But eight years ago, many in my generation couldn’t vote. We didn’t choose the President, his wars, or his policies. In fact, young Americans have largely rejected the politics of fear and division that dominated those formative years of our political consciousness—voting 2 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama. Today we remember the victims and honor our heroes, but we also have a new President, new crises, and three new numbers: 3-5-0. 350.
I'm on a Midwest swing of my book tour and unlike my other trips so far, I am running into some Republicans at my book events (as well as spending some time with relatives who are Republicans). Part of that, of course, is that I am close to home, and in places like Lincoln, NE, people come out to see the hometown boy who has gone to the big city, even if they are of a different political persuasion. And part of it is simply location: there are simply a lot more Republicans per capita in Nebraska than there are in most of the cities I've been to on the book tour (SF, NYC, Boston, etc.).
It has led to some interesting questions and conversations which I love. There are few things I like better than a fun debate.
I have a nephew who is a very conservative Republican, and is also a strong debater. He has read The Progressive Revolution, which must have been tough for him to take, and is planning on writing me a long response, which I look forward to getting. But in the meantime, he pushed me very hard on the whole hope vs. fear theme of my book, said it was a cheap shot, that progressives have been using fear in their arguments as much as conservatives.
It's a worthy argument. More in the extended entry.
The financial markets are again getting pummeled, both domestically and globally; the nearly $800 billion stimulus package signed with fanfare by President Obama has done little to alter the mood. In fact, if you read through financial websites and assorted blogs on politics, economics, or anything related to those, you will find a nearly endless sea of misery. The level of anger, pessimism, despair, and sheer hopelessness seems to reach new peaks every week, in inverse relation to the movement of global equity prices and the size of individual retirement accounts.
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
Now that Mr. Reid will be making a critical decision on the FISA legislation and we need so desperately our Representaitives to be vocal about their opposition to immunity, let's be clear about where Kucinich stands:
"I object to any immunity for telecommunications companies and demand a full accounting of these companies' involvement to Congress and to the American public. When corporations cooperate with the government to strip people of their Constitutional rights, that is a text book description of fascism. There must not be any place in America for this type of conduct." -Dennis Kucinich
There has been a lot of discussion about Obama's campaign faltering, and his failure to bring together a progressive coalition and act as a progressive candidate.
And he has fallen in my view as of late, and I have said he is now in a 3 way tie with Edwards, and Dodd for my vote.
But there were several points last night during the debate in which I was reminded of why I have endorsed him up to this point.
I want to give one example and analysis over the jump.
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