How We Got Our Morals
By: Ilias Rentzeperis
Tags: Psychology, History, Philosophy, Science, Neuroscience

Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a God. Aristotle <Politics>

Peter Kropotkin: Capitalism Effaces Natural Tendencies

Chomsky’s views on the innate goodness of human beings are influenced in part from the writings of one of the most important theoreticians of anarchism, Peter Kropotkin. At the turn of the 20th century, Kropotkin published ‘Mutual aid: A factor of evolution’, a collection of essays where he rejected the tenets of social Darwinism that natural selection and survival of the fittest are the dominant human inclinations driving social interactions. Instead, he held that animals, including humans, are naturally predisposed to co-operate with each other.

Kropotkin argued that the vast majority of species display altruistic characteristics; they live in groups and tend to support each other. He recounted observations of different animals sharing resources with their group: ants regurgitating food for other hungry ants; white-tailed eagles signaling with their cries to their companions a potential prey; house sparrows sharing their food; rats feeding their invalids. But cooperation is not limited to the sharing of food, it extends to all aspects of life: parrots setting up sentries to signal the rest of the group in case of danger, wolves hunting in packs, birds emigrating in bands, ants constructing elaborate passages and dwellings for their community. Moreover, from the play of animals with their congeners, Kropotkin inferred that social life is not necessarily practiced only to serve a survival purpose, but also for its own sake, for the love of socializing.

Kropotkin reasoned that for life in societies to be possible, a number of social feelings needed to be in place, with the most important being an innate sense of justice. These feelings, being partly conscious and reasoned in humans, may well be the foundation on which moral values are built. Some human institutions can nurture and develop social feelings, but others can have quite the opposite effect and instead develop instincts of self-assertion. Kropotkin gave examples of both. In primitive tribes or ancient city-states in Greece individuals could identify their existence and get meaning from it only through the participation in the tribe or the polis respectively. These societies are contrasted with the capitalist state at the turn of the 20th century which absorbs all social functions and necessarily favors ‘the development of an unbridled, narrow minded individualism. As the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other’.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages? William Golding <Lord of the Flies>

My Take

Google Maps has diminished my ability to navigate and remember routes, affecting the grid and place cells in my hippocampus. Flooding of information and of other sensory input from my digital surroundings have shortened my attention span, restructuring my limbic reward pathways that release and respond to dopamine. They have also changed my knowledge and perspective of the world, triggering new wiring patterns in my cerebral cortex. Technology, among other social structures, constantly mold who I am, rewiring the connections in my brain, reinforcing some patterns and atrophying others. But even though our brains are astonishingly plastic to external influences, there is a limit to their adaptability.

In dystopian novels where the government implements some kind of social engineering to control behavior, the protagonists are emotionally distressed for their life runs counter to their nature.We are ambivalent: selfish and altruistic, violent and caring, rational and sentimental. Sure, society plays a role in that it can strengthen certain natural tendencies at the expense of their opposite parts, but the diminished sentiments are always there, lurking at the fringes of our consciousness.

I believe there is something in us, innate and hardwired to an extent, that is transcendental, in that it aims for something outside of our self. It strives for the collective good. But these feelings come in pairs. We are also selfish and self-serving. The contradicting parts come in different ratios for different people. Conditioning by our surroundings also changes the ratios. There is some truth that we are products of our environment but in directions that satisfy our natural inclinations. And the environment has not been created in a vacuum; in part, it is a reflection of who we are.