The imaginary lines between "us" and "them."
Posted May 07, 2012, by Shimon Edelman Ph.D.
Original link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-happiness-pursuit/201205/what-do-you-mean-human
For a group of humans to feel special, chosen, or perhaps just singled out in some tragic way is a common corollary of our species' predisposition to clannishness. Our collective history is, of course, one long list of episodes exemplifying the "us against them" mentality at work. Indeed, a famous bloody episode of national-religious politics exacerbated by clan rivalry happened right there in Glencoe, where on February 13, 1692, the local MacDonalds were massacred by the King's troops under the command of a Campbell.
In the following centuries, the development of increasingly effective killing technologies has made possible wholesale slaughter, both of entire armies and of "innocent civilians" (a distasteful expression that implicitly legitimizes the killing of those other civilians who happened to have been conscripted into service, brainwashed into signing up to fight for God and country, or simply too poor to resist the lure of a soldier's salary). The daunting task of figuring out how otherwise seemingly normal people can so nonchalantly dish out suffering or even death to their fellow human beings has been taken up by philosophers (some of whom, such as Asa Kasher, participated in developing a moral code for the conduct of war), political theorists (such as Hannah Arendt), and psychologists (such as Milgram and Zimbardo). One of the best concise discussions that sheds light on the difficulty of this task is, however, to be found in an unlikely place: a 1959 editorial published in Astounding Science Fiction by John W. Campbell, Jr.
A standing challenge that Campbell, a tremendously respected editor, posed to contributors to his journal was to write a convincing description of an alien that "thinks as well as a human, but not like a human." (As someone who appreciates good sci-fi, I sometimes wish that the writers of the Hollywood-style sci-fi would stop their interminable parade of the psychologically all-too-human Klingons, Predators, and Pandorans, but then I realize that a plot centered on a truly alien way of thinking would appear to an average movie-going human either terminally boring or scary beyond belief.) Campbell's Challenge leads naturally to the question that served as the title of his 1959 essay, which I have borrowed for use in the present post: "What do you mean... human?"
In his essay, which is just as eminently readable today as it no doubt was back at the height of Cold War, Campbell muses on the possible ways of defining "us" in the perennially familiar expression "us against them." It would be interesting to examine his observations in the light of the insights into ethnocentrism and the in-group/out-group effects, attained over the past decades by researchers in social and personality psychology (e.g., D. R. Kinder and C. D. Kam. Us against Them. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (2010), reviewed here; or, R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation, Psychological Bulletin 117:497-529, 1995). Instead, I offer here a quick synthesis of a couple of perspectives that are not often brought to bear on ethnocentrism and its ethical repercussions, such as embodied cognition and computational cognitive science, with a bit of science fiction thrown in for good measure.
Considerations of embodiment (a theoretical issue in cognitive science that came up in my previous post) and situatedness (a complementary idea that stresses the importance of environment in shaping cognition and behavior) are relevant here because people tend to extend the in-group label more readily to others who look like them and who behave similarly.
Source: http://media.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Battlestar_Galactica_Last_Supper.jpg
Wha's like us?
Damn few,
And they're a' deid.
For a group of humans to feel special, chosen, or perhaps just singled out in some tragic way is a common corollary of our species' predisposition to clannishness. Our collective history is, of course, one long list of episodes exemplifying the "us against them" mentality at work. Indeed, a famous bloody episode of national-religious politics exacerbated by clan rivalry happened right there in Glencoe, where on February 13, 1692, the local MacDonalds were massacred by the King's troops under the command of a Campbell.
In the following centuries, the development of increasingly effective killing technologies has made possible wholesale slaughter, both of entire armies and of "innocent civilians" (a distasteful expression that implicitly legitimizes the killing of those other civilians who happened to have been conscripted into service, brainwashed into signing up to fight for God and country, or simply too poor to resist the lure of a soldier's salary). The daunting task of figuring out how otherwise seemingly normal people can so nonchalantly dish out suffering or even death to their fellow human beings has been taken up by philosophers (some of whom, such as Asa Kasher, participated in developing a moral code for the conduct of war), political theorists (such as Hannah Arendt), and psychologists (such as Milgram and Zimbardo). One of the best concise discussions that sheds light on the difficulty of this task is, however, to be found in an unlikely place: a 1959 editorial published in Astounding Science Fiction by John W. Campbell, Jr.
A standing challenge that Campbell, a tremendously respected editor, posed to contributors to his journal was to write a convincing description of an alien that "thinks as well as a human, but not like a human." (As someone who appreciates good sci-fi, I sometimes wish that the writers of the Hollywood-style sci-fi would stop their interminable parade of the psychologically all-too-human Klingons, Predators, and Pandorans, but then I realize that a plot centered on a truly alien way of thinking would appear to an average movie-going human either terminally boring or scary beyond belief.) Campbell's Challenge leads naturally to the question that served as the title of his 1959 essay, which I have borrowed for use in the present post: "What do you mean... human?"
In his essay, which is just as eminently readable today as it no doubt was back at the height of Cold War, Campbell muses on the possible ways of defining "us" in the perennially familiar expression "us against them." It would be interesting to examine his observations in the light of the insights into ethnocentrism and the in-group/out-group effects, attained over the past decades by researchers in social and personality psychology (e.g., D. R. Kinder and C. D. Kam. Us against Them. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (2010), reviewed here; or, R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation, Psychological Bulletin 117:497-529, 1995). Instead, I offer here a quick synthesis of a couple of perspectives that are not often brought to bear on ethnocentrism and its ethical repercussions, such as embodied cognition and computational cognitive science, with a bit of science fiction thrown in for good measure.
Considerations of embodiment (a theoretical issue in cognitive science that came up in my previous post) and situatedness (a complementary idea that stresses the importance of environment in shaping cognition and behavior) are relevant here because people tend to extend the in-group label more readily to others who look like them and who behave similarly.
Human or Cylon?
This approach does seem to make evolutionary sense: others that look and act like us may do so because they are related to us, and so, to the extent that this assumption holds, a trait of being accepting and helpful toward the likes of us will persist in the population. It also makes more sense than the foundational postulate for ethics that is advocated by some religions, namely, that anyone with a soul should be treated as human: as Campbell notes, if we assume that humans, unlike animals, machines, or demons, have souls, "... the problem remains. History indicates that it was just as difficult to distinguish between humans and demons as it is, currently, to distinguish between humans and robots." (A shrewd guess, based on the state of the art of robotics in 1959, in which Campbell neatly anticipated the idea behind the recent remake of the TV series Battlestar Galactica.)
Campbell next considers the possibility of basing the inclusion criterion for "humanity" on the candidate entity's emotions: if he or she or it "feels about things as I do, I need not concern myself with how he thinks about them, or what he does. He is 'human'—my kind of human." This idea, however, immediately runs into problems of its own. For one thing, reliable attribution of emotions is no easier than soul detection (as discussed in The Soul of the Mark III Beast, an excerpt from The Soul of Anna Klane by Terrel Miedaner, which appears as chapter 8 in D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett's The Mind's I, Basic Books, 1981). Moreover, the very distinction between feeling and thinking turns out, in the light of modern computational cognitive science, to be nonexistent (see, for instance, Marvin Minsky's book The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind, Simon & Schuster, 2006).
While an embodied, situated, computational understanding of cognition—construed so as to encompass all aspects of the mind, including emotions—is not going to go away (for the simple reason that it happens to be true), it is not likely to lead to a universally agreed-upon push for a scientific remedy for the human clannishness. What we face here is a true paradox. To agree to approach the question of humanity scientifically, members of the H. sapiens species would have to forswear the evolutionary roots of their predilection to draw lines between themselves and "others." But such a denial of one's evolutionary heritage is sure to get one automatically branded as other than human.
Indeed, even just attempting to frame the discussion of humanity in scientific terms is liable to get one into hot water (as Campbell puts it, defining "human" is a "somewhat explosive subject"). Consider, for instance, the question of the role of desires in the mental life of humans. In my recent book, whose subject matter is happiness, I offered a reasoned claim to the effect that a transient good feeling, brought about by achievement, is a fundamental evolutionary trait of ours, and that therefore so are our desires. A corollary of this claim is that a training regimen designed to rid a person of all desire, as suggested, for instance, by the Buddha's Fire Sermon, would—if successful—do something quite drastic and irreversible to his or her humanity:
The final destination of the pilgrim who sets out on the Buddha's Eightfold Path is a state of liberation that is nowhere nearly as easy to understand as a simple readmission into Eden. On some accounts, the state of nirvana implies cessation of cognition as we know it. To cease having desires, desirable as it may be in view of this doctrine's calculus of worldly suffering, means to cease being human. Moreover, the journey to this destination is irreversible, because once it has been attained, the desire cannot possibly arise in the pilgrim to reconsider and return. On other accounts, however, those who walk this path become more, not less, human—not by rejecting their nature, but rather by gaining insight into it, and thereby learning to live the way we ought to live, given what we are.Mentioning this idea in a Salon interview led to a flood of talkbacks, which alternated between remarking on my stupidity (granted—I should have known better than to broach such a topic in a setting that values sound bites over an in-depth discussion) and calling out my blasphemous intentions (luckily, Buddhism does not seem to have the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition). It seems that, just as in 1959, we are not quite ready to dig for truth with regard to certain kinds of self-knowledge. One wonders if we shall ever be.
