As I alluded to in my first post, the foundations of morality and its influence on individual and group behavior is a growing interest amongst social and cognitive scientists. Based on genetics studies and better brain imaging, it’s becoming readily clear that humans aren’t tabula rasa, even as we have to accept that it will long (if not always) be a mystery to how nature interacts with nurture.
I meant to link to this TED talk in my introduction and was inspired to write this post when I realized my error. As the speaker somberly notes:
Our righteous minds were designed to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams and blind us to the truth.
Yet this should not be cause for despair, merely acceptance. As the speaker notes (and I encourage you to all watch his talk and take the quizzes on the website) by focusing on the reality of division, rather than the substance of it, we are blind.
In my day job I try to apply mathematical constructs and understanding that are less than 30 years old (which means its an infant in mathematical timescales) to investigate biological systems and hopefully diagnose/cure disease. It is so obvious that the status quo approach is so wrong on a fundamental level, but we run into surprisingly great difficulty in trying to identify areas were it matters in practice. A large part is that many of the practitioners of the new science work completely on theoretical levels, while we are trying to apply it to real data, but it is more than that.
While we anticipated great strides from our revolution, we discovered that the accepted approximation of the Truth was accurate, even as it destroyed valuable details. Chastened, we stepped back and took a serious look at the areas where our new approach gave insight and those that did not. We realized that part of the reason why we were having trouble was that we were asking the wrong questions. We were looking for new answers, and we ended up with new questions: it is these new questions that would have never been proposed that may truly provide new insight.
In my first post I stated I was calling for radical solutions steeped in conservative approaches. But as the new science of morality is starting to suggest, perhaps the problem is that we have been looking for answers that seem to work, instead of accepting that there are none; by changing our perception of the nature of groups, the path will be open to devising new questions that will define our success or failure.