In my previous post I advanced the idea that people turn to moralism and from there to government coercion when faced with a free-rider problem. I didn’t provide a detailed, concrete example of the kind of free-rider problem I had in mind but David Foster provided me one: vaccinations.
Morality and Philosphy
Moralism as a Response to a Free-Rider Problem
From the perspective of evolutionary game theory, moralism presents something of a dilemma.
Evolutionary game theory is a branch of mathematics that seeks to explain the behavior of animals and humans based on the assumption that all behavior ultimately must arise from the imperatives imposed by natural selection. From this perspective, human behavior originates largely in selfish motives and true altruism becomes the most difficult behavior of all to evoke.
Moralists exist in all cultures and in all cultures the moralist seeks to persuade or coerce other members of the culture into obeying the moral codes of the culture. Moralists concentrate on suppressing behaviors that do not cause immediate harm to others. Indeed, most moralists target self-destructive behaviors. Both individuals and societies spend a great deal of time and energy moralizing.
The evolutionary game theorist is forced to ask: Why bother? What is in it for the moralist?
The Culture of Death in a Chicago Elevator
I work in a building with an in-elevator video system. This morning, a tale of russian cultists, 29 in all threatening to blow themselves up in their sealed cave if anyone interrupts them as they wait for the end of the world this spring. “Who cares” erupts loudly from the only other person in the elevator, a guy in a business suit. I was “It’s always good to talk them off the ledge” I replied and off I went to work.
You had to be there to catch the contempt, the utter disregard for the sanctity of life in his simple words. He was wondering why his life was being inconvenienced by these russian religious fanatics when he could be getting his stock news on his elevator ride. That was how little their lives meant to him. It was the culture of death in a nutshell. These 29 people (I later learned 4 were children, the youngest under 2 years old) were just meat to this guy and not only that, he had to share the sentiment so we could all join him in being unhappy at the inconvenience. We could have found out about the Dow 15 seconds earlier. And what about Britney? Don’t these Captivate Network guys have any sense of proportion?
The Culture of Death, where the rubber meets the road, will have a suit on more often than not, will be ‘respectable’ more often than not, and, more often than not, will insist on you joining in. That’s creepy, and not as theoretical as it was yesterday.
Children of Light, Children of Darkness
The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:
“The biblical sense of history can make Niebhur seem like something other than a liberal. In the ’60’s, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era’s liberal reforms”
It wasn’t Niebuhr’s religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr’s writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman’s bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:
“The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness – ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil…Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics” ( Stockman,24).
I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.
My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.
ADDENDUM:
Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.
Cross-posted at Zenpundit
We’re Making Progess! Sort Of.
Wont as I am to see the silver lining in every cloud, I can’t help but think that two recent racial episodes represent a sort of progress in racial relations.
In the Jena-6 case in Louisiana, a group of six black teenagers sucker-punched a white teenager and then kicked the crap out him while he lay unconscious on the ground. They did so after the white teenager made racially derogatory comments.
In the Duke non-rape case, a white, vote whoring D.A. framed a group of (mostly) upper-class white jocks for the rape of a black women. He appears to have been motivated by a desire to curry favor with local black voters.