Our Human Herds, by Martin Fritz

In Our Human Herds: The Philosophy of Dual Morality and a Theory of Moral Evolution, Martin Fritz says:

…what I propose… is that each and every one of us carries within us two distinct moral codes, either of which can be understood as right, depending upon our circumstances…

The two distinct moral codes have a biological origin. By switching back and forth between these two sometimes cooperating and sometimes conflicting moral patterns we discover that the things we find right in one view can be seen as wrong in the other.

It’s an interesting thought, and that’s pretty much the book in a nutshell. However, it goes on for almost a thousand pages of elucidation as the author tries to hammer home his point.

To expand, what he is saying above is that essentially while we now tend to think of our views as moral or immoral, right or wrong, these are actually fairly fluid judgments and they depend upon what is happening around us. What is right for one person in one situation is wrong for someone else. And this a biological imperative. He gives numerous examples and explanations, but it boils down to this: there is one mindset for when we have plenty, and one mindset for when we don’t. You could say today that this is the difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives view the world through fearful eyes, and appear cold and cruel from the liberal perspective. Liberals view the world as providing more than enough for everyone and act dangerously from the conservative perspective.

“Moral conflict,” he says, “began to take shape not as a battle between right and wrong, but a needed and necessary struggle between right and right.” What he means is that we need both the fearful, outsider-hating conservative to keep the group (or herd) on its toes, and the sympathetic, bleeding-heart liberal to make sure everyone has enough. It’s a result of evolution.

One point I found very interesting is this:

Feeling precedes logical justification. Usually, it is after we become aware how we feel that we look for logical arguments to support this emotional position.

How true that is, and it sits nicely with books I’ve read last year about psychology.

Overall, Fritz’s book was pretty interesting and certainly it’s hard to argue with his statements. It was certainly not very original, but he does acknowledge that the dual morality theory is not his own. One problem I had was that, while the concept as a whole is somewhat complex, the book tended to often become bogged down in over-simplicity - a tendency to state the obvious. It was also very repetitive, which sucked the enjoyment out of reading it. 

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley

I liked the sound of this book when I read its synopsis on Amazon and so I bought it a month ago. Indeed, I agree with the author in most respects and many of his arguments, I feel, are correct - the world is getting "better" in most measurable ways and when people talk about the doom and gloom of coming decades, they're typically misguided.

However, I found the author insufferable and struggled to reach the end of his book.



In The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley is writing from the perspective of the financial crisis. He obviously wrote this book as a reaction to the panic that was caused by that particular event. As such, he looks back through human history, nearly to the dawn of time, and then very laboriously describes how everything has just gotten better and better and better, and thus how it's inevitable that things will keep getting better.

He makes some good arguments, but he labors the point endlessly and sounds like an awful curmudgeon. He makes petty attacks on nameless people and seems out to set the world to rights based on his own trivial dislikes. He takes breaks from describing human history to attack proponents of organic farming, his son's teachers, and the like. He seems childish and condescending.

One of his central ideas is that economics - the market - is responsible for absolutely every single positive thing that ever happened. In fact, it's what caused humans to change from animals to people. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, but he drives this point home throughout the book, even offering petty insults to the biologists and economists who refute him, yet remain nameless. At a certain point you just wish he would stop creating little parables to describe each stage in human development and how trade suddenly made everything great.

"Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution," he claims. Indeed. Perhaps he should've left it at that.

He argues that kindness comes from interdependence - ie capitalism. "There is a direct link between commerce and virtue," he says. ... "Where commerce thrives, creativity and compassion both flourish."

This is one of his better arguments, and I must say I agree with him wholly. He also asserts that people like to think of themselves as self-sufficient, but it has been humanity's mixing and mingling and trading that has lead to our rise as a species.

Unfortunately, throughout the book, as I've said, the author sounds like a horrible person and one gets the feeling, reading the book, that one's sitting in the corner of a room at a party being lectured by a terrible bore. It's not that he's wrong but he's just awful to listen to... Moreover, although I agree with him, his arguments do seem very cherry-picked, and his research seems to have the depth of a rather hollow Wikipedia page. Matt Ridley, it seems, is a man who never considered for a moment that he might not be correct about something. 

The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

"Intelligence is no inoculation against bias." 

Perhaps to some, the above quote is blindingly obvious, but I suspect that most of us, myself included, like to think that with acquired knowledge comes freedom from all forms of ignorance - biases included. Alas, that's only true up until a point. Intelligent people are far from perfect, and we all have our own biases in life - some more damaging than others. 

I think that we all, more or less, over-estimate our own intelligence, too, and that probably contributes to our idea of intelligence as precluding us from the trap of bias. We assume that bias and ignorance go hand in hand because we see these in the people around us, and yet that's not very likely, is it? We're all biased in some way, regardless of intelligence. 

This a key theme of Will Storr's book, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, which I bought after reading a few Jon Ronson books and being promised by the algorithms at Amazon that Storr was popular among Ronson fans. And I was not disappointed. 

I admit that I bought the book because I like books about science and psychology. The title made me think that Storr would simply berate religious types throughout the book. So there's my bias: I'm an atheist, and whilst I believe in a live-and-let-live world, I enjoy reading books that tell me I'm right about the world, and then educate me with lots of stuff I didn't know, too. 

The book begins with Storr out in the Aussie outback, talking with a famous creationist. I was excited. This was the beginning of some creationist-bashing. I love evolution and books about the history of our world. 

Indeed, Storr is also an atheist and a man of science (well, an interest in science). He makes no secret of the fact that the creationist is undeniably wrong in his beliefs, and yet he makes another interesting point: the creationist is a highly intelligent man. 

In our modern social media world we like to engage in tribalism just like the days of yore. Liberals and conservatives, religious and non-religious alike, we are evolved but nonetheless ruled by our tribal mentality, and we forget sometimes that people on the other side - the "them" that Ronson wrote about, are often just as intelligent, if not more, than "we" are. Yes, they can be wrong and still smart. So can we. 

That should be obvious but it's not. Or at least it's something that we need to remind ourselves of. As the quote I began this article with observes, our adversaries aren't necessarily stupid because they're wrong, and we aren't necessarily right because we're smart. 

Storr goes on from the anti-evolutionist to speak with holocaust deniers, past life regressionists, homeopaths, Illuminati-believers, and other people who are absolutely, 100% wrong in their beliefs. He doesn't mock them, but instead explains through science how they came to be this way. How could intelligent people believe such unintelligent things? 

I've not read a horror book in a long time but this one gave me the chills. Reading it, I realized just how unreliable the human mind is. We cannot trust our memories, nor can we rely upon our perceptions. Our brains make stories to justify gut feelings. No matter how scientific we try to be, we are only human and we make mistakes. 

Storr also takes on skeptics and the defenders of science to show that it is not just the religious people who are wrong, or the ones with non-mainstream beliefs. The title, in fact, is a tad misleading in that regard. At the end of this book I felt I couldn't trust my own mind. I worried I'd start seeing ghosts because maybe they were real and I'd deluded myself, or maybe they wouldn't be real but my brain would see them anyway.... 

The conclusion to this fantastic book is that humans are natural story-tellers and we don't even realize that we're telling stories. Liars don't usually know that they're lying. The heretics don't mean to be wrong and they're not idiots; they're just flawed humans like all of us. We all think of ourselves as the hero of a story, but:

"Heretics are often betrayed by the spotless coherence of their plots. They tell the clearest tales with the most perfect separation of good guy and bad. It is why they should be trusted." 

Read this book. It will change you.