About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Friday, September 23, 2011

An optimistic look at human nature

by Massimo Pigliucci

I’ve recently read Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. It is a manifesto in defense of critical thinking, the role of the humanities (alongside science) in liberal arts education, and the crucial contribution of the latter to an open democratic society. But this is not what this post is about, largely.

Rather, I want to focus on a somewhat peripheral discussion that Nussbaum engages in, in chapter 3 of her book (entitled “Educating citizens: the moral [and anti-moral] emotions”). Nussbaum briefly relates three famous experiments demonstrating how easy it is to lead people to engage in bad behavior. The first experiment was conducted by Stanley Milgram (and has been repeated several times since). It’s the one where people were convinced to administer what they thought were increasingly painful electrical shock to “subjects” (in reality, confederates of the experimenters) who were allegedly being used to study the connection between learning and punishment. The results clearly showed that a figure of authority (a “doctor” in white lab coat, for instance) can easily induce people to engage in what would normally be considered cruel behavior towards strangers. Milgram himself set out to do the experiments because he was interested in the question of what could have possibly led so many Germans to acquiesce and collaborate with the Nazi policies of extermination during World War II.

The second experiment mentioned by Nussbaum was conducted by Solomon Asch to explore the effects of conformity. In this case subjects were shown, for instance, images of lines of different lengths and were asked to make judgments about their relative lengths. Unbeknownst to them, a number of confederates were pretending to participate in the experiment, but in reality gave coordinated wrong answers to the questions. Astonishingly, a number of subjects began to agree with the confederates, even though it was very clear that they were agreeing to the wrong answer.

Finally, Nussbaum refers to Philip Zimbardo’s experiment on prison dynamics, during which subjects told to play the role of prisoners or prison guards in a correction facility quickly began to behave as victims and oppressors respectively, with the first group passively accepting violence and the second one escalating their practices to include torture.

The typical interpretation of experiments such as those above is that people are easy to manipulate and that beneath a veneer of civility we can all be lead to inflict pain (Milgram and Zimbardo), be willingly victimized (Zimbardo), or endorse obvious falsities (Asch). But Nussbaum turns our perspective around and argues that another way to look at exactly the same data is that it is relatively easy to avoid the above mentioned negative outcomes by paying attention to the structure of our society (and — which goes with the main topic of her book — to the way we educate our children to be full members of that society).

In particular, Nussbaum argues that three types of structure are pernicious because they are conducive to bad human behavior (though they are most certainly not its only determinants): lack of personal accountability; discouragement of dissent; and de-humanization.

Lack of accountability is what we see in action in the Milgram experiments, where people get to delegate moral responsibility to the authority (and notice that the authority there was a scientist, not a nazi with a machine gun); discouragement of dissent is what happened during the Asch experiment, where people gave what they probably knew was the wrong answer because everyone else around them was doing the same (indeed, crucially, when the experiment was conducted allowing just one of the confederates to openly dissent, subjects were much less likely to adopt the groupthink attitude); finally, de-humanization is what characterized the Zimbardo protocol.

It should be easy to see at this point why Nussbaum links these structural issues to liberal arts education. At its best, teaching humanities (and science) is precisely about encouraging students’ willingness to question authority (against Milgram type effect), to speak out even when in a minority position (contra Asch), and to appreciate differences between genders and across cultures as quintessentially human (against Zimbardo).

Instead, we spend increasing amounts of time and money making sure that “no child is left behind” by having kids learn how to pass a standardized test that has little if any relation to the structural issues affecting human behavior in modern society.

27 comments:

  1. I have not yet read Nussbaum's book, though I had already ordered it from Amazon. I'd like to look it up more in detail, but in the meantime my attention was called to her idea (in Massimo's version) that

    "it is relatively easy to avoid the above mentioned negative outcomes by paying attention to the structure of our society (and — which goes with the main topic of her book — to the way we educate our children to be full members of that society). In particular, Nussbaum argues that three types of structure are pernicious because they are conducive to bad human behavior (though they are most certainly not its only determinants): lack of personal accountability; discouragement of dissent; and de-humanization."

    Now, the experiments to the contrary (Milgram et al), showing how easy it is to produce the opposite results, are actual experiments. Moreover, there are several historical examples (notably the Nazi period) of masses of people engaging in dehumanized practices under the spell of some leader or ideology.
    The reverse idea of Nussbaum's, that it is "relatively easy" to reverse that influence remains, in my view, as a speculative hypothesis. Projects to create a more perfect society, a more humane style of coexistence among people, a society dominated not by greed or hatred or egoism but by love, cooperation and solidarity, abound in the literature (especially from the various versions of Utopian thinking), but I have yet to see any of these projects materialized.

    Indeed, modern capitalist society (although allegedly based on self interest) is by and large more humane than most of its predecessor or contemporary alternatives (if the occasional loony in Norway or Columbine is excepted).

    Therefore, two lines of doubt: (1) is really possible (or "easy") to achieve what Martha Nussbaum expects to achieve though education and good practices? (2) how it is that Western capitalism, ostensibly based on self interest, looks much more humane, all told, that say the Roman Republic or Empire, Absolute Monarchy, the Middle Kingdom in China, or Islamic societies, all founded on other values that range from classical philosophy to Christianity to belief in Allah the Compassionate?

    I confess not to have an answer. One glimpse of one might be that "it is not the conscience of people that determines their lives, but their material life that determines their conscience" (though I would put it in much more relative and moderate terms than Karl Marx put it in the Preface to his 1859 Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy). Perhaps it is not ideas that shape society; perhaps societies evolve by some complex internal mechanisms (including ideas but also other things), often diverging from the conscious intent of its founders or anybody else.

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  2. Hector, were the fascist regimes of WWII (most notably Nussbaum's example of Nazi Germany) not examples of "modern capitalist society" (albeit, economically depressed ones)?

    I think so, which is still compatible with the premise that satisfying basic material needs is a necessary (albeit, insufficient) ingredient in producing desirable outcomes.

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  3. Hector,

    the phrase "relatively easy" is mine, not Nussbaum's. At any rate, I think you are simply not seeing the flip side of the coin, which is what Nussbaum points to. Why don't we have more genocides and other horrible things happening? In part, she argues, this is because we structure our societies in such a way as to discourage Milgram-type situations. That is backed up by a huge amount of empirical evidence, it's called modern living.

    Her only additional point is that - once we realize that societal conditions and structures do have that sort of large effect - we better push for the sort of education that helps maintaining and improving those conditions and structures.

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  4. Mufi,
    of course Nazi Germany was capitalistic, of sorts, but I was alluding to Western societies, all of which are capitalist but not based on a Behemoth dirigiste State with a nondemocratic regime.
    On the other hand, I have not said that "satisfying basic material needs is a necessary (albeit, insufficient) ingredient in producing desirable outcomes", nor is this idea implied in Marx's phrase, for that matter.
    My tentative hypothesis was that societies are not simply "applied ideas", ideas put to practice. Societies evolve along centuries, due to multiple forces of various kinds (including ideas and purposeful political projects, but also other factors). I also mentioned that attempts to build a better society based on some high-minded principles (including 20th century Leninist and Maoist socialism, or Islamic theocracies, or Medieval Christendom, and in their own peculiar way also Nazism and Fascism) often result in outcomes far removed from the original intent. On the other hand, societies ostensibly based on the individual pursuit of well-being, not only but predominantly through endeavors intended "for profit", have arguably resulted in more humane outcomes than societies like those mentioned before. None of them, of course, is in any way totally good or totally evil.
    One question we should ask is why did experiments such as Milgram's and others actually succeed, while actual experimentation with Utopian doctrines such as Fourier's falansteries and other such models utterly and unanimously failed (as well as Che Guevara's "new man", supposedly motivated not by profit but social responsibility, and many other similar historical experiments).
    Are societies amenable to design? Or do they "evolve", i.e. they are the outcome of some kind of "evolution" governed by its own internal mechanisms? Can societies be changed by design, or they change according to their own dynamics? And if design has any role to play, is it only that someone may "propose" a design for others to follow, or does it require something more concrete, such as a political organization to attain political power and then apply the new design? What (in the inner workings of societies) makes some of these political revolutions succeed while others miserably fail?

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  5. Massimo, I agree on the "flip side" you mention.

    But we have not always "structured our societies" with that outcome (minimizing Milgram type outcomes) in mind.

    In fact, societies that had been "structured" on the principles of the Enlightenment and the French and American Revolution did engage in genocide and various other atrocities (either in their home ground or more frequently abroad, e.g. in African colonies like the Belgian Congo, South Africa and many other places, not to mention American slavery, decimation of American Indians during the Conquest of the Wild West, British atrocities in Ireland or India, and so on). Some cherished principles of enlightened liberty (such as the right to bear arms) have produced also their own unintended results in places like Columbine and many others.

    Of course I agree that education should push for the adequate sort of values (i.e. the values we in the West consider adequate, but an Afghan Pashtun may deem decadent and despicable). But even so, certain objective traits of each society, and even certain traits of our own (evolved) human nature may still hold sway to alter the outcome of such high-minded projects as a humanistic education for all.
    I am not fighting against Martha Nussbaum's ideas. I am only expressing a certain degree of skepticism.

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  6. Not to pursue tangents, but the economic policies of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Spain, and Portugal were not 'capitalistic' in any relevant sense- at leadt, not if one does not define 'capitalism' as simply not communism. The economic ideology and policies of the aforementioned are more accurately identified as corporatist or corporatist-socialist (socialist insofar as the state effected considerable welfare policies).

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  7. Hector: Societies evolve along centuries, due to multiple forces of various kinds (including ideas and purposeful political projects, but also other factors).

    Sounds like a good argument for learning and accounting for those "other factors" when formulating and pursuing political projects (which all politically active people do - not only those with grand utopian visions in mind).

    Eamon:

    The economic ideology and policies of the aforementioned are more accurately identified as corporatist or corporatist-socialist (socialist insofar as the state effected considerable welfare policies).

    I was hesitant to respond to Hector's invocation of the 'c' word, but now that it's done...

    By your criteria, what real-world modern nation qualifies as having a "capitalist" economy? After all, even the USA (whose leaders seem most fond and protective of that label) include some degree of state involvement in the economy (e.g. taxes, subsidies, regulation, welfare, infrastructure, etc.).

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  8. mufi said...
    "Hector [wrote]: 'Societies evolve along centuries, due to multiple forces of various kinds (including ideas and purposeful political projects, but also other factors).'
    Mufi comments: "Sounds like a good argument for learning and accounting for those "other factors" when formulating and pursuing political projects (which all politically active people do - not only those with grand utopian visions in mind)."
    Quite. But political projects may be more or less realistic, in view of the underlying features of society. "The material conditions of social life" (which are not limited to economic constraints) pose limitations to the feasibility of political projects. Besides, even if the political project goes ahead, actual outcomes are sadly not always those originally intended.


    And of course, "capitalistic" does not include only societies with a totally free market and no State intervention: such societies never existed in fact. All markets develop within certain normative and institutional settings (e.g. legal and coercive guarantees for private property). In my lexicon, a capitalist economy is one where the allocation of resources is done mostly through the operation of markets, and where the organization of production takes the form of enterprises involving private property of the means of production combined with hired labor. An "economy" is quite often identified with a "national" economy, but this is rather obsolete nowadays: the capitalist economy has got globalized or transnational, and is thus best described as a worldwide economy, though its political structures remain largely national (albeit with some increasing cession of economic sovereignty to supranational bodies).

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  9. Mufi,

    If we define capitalism as an economic system in which there is predominantly private ownership of capital goods (the means of production), where capital investments are determined via private decision-making, and where prices, production, and the distribution of goods and services are predominantly determined via competition in a free market, then the fascist regimes circa WW-2 cannot be described accurately as capitalist.

    Of course, you are correct to point out that the matter really is one of degree; the identification of an economic system must be made on a continuum. Nevertheless, whilst the WW-2 era fascist regimes certainly had more elements of capitalism than, say, the USSR, they did not have enough to qualify as capitalist- at least, not in the way that Germany, France, the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Japan, the U.K., etc., can be identified as capitalist today.

    E.g., Stalin's USSR (and even Lenin's USSR) possessed capitalist elements (markets, prices, partial, albeit very small, ownership of capital goods), but for the sake of clarity we ought not to identify the Soviet economy as capitalist.

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  10. I'm beginning to seriously flirt with the idea of banning all talk of capitalism and libertarianism on the discussion threads... Nah, they are repetitive, but libertarians always dramatically increase traffic to the site. Too bad I don't make any money out of it.

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  11. Massimo,

    I wish you could make money from your site. (Add revenue, perhaps?) But if you ban all talk of libertarianism and capitalism on the discussion threads, do you promise also to save us the inconvenience of reading your very bad arguments against libertarianism and free markets and refrain from posting any?

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  12. Some blogs, Massimo, jave a "tip jar" to receive contributions. There is software to operate it, with payments going via PayPal and similar channels.

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  13. Massimo,

    Actually, my comment was made as a veiled jest. As I have said before, I appreciate your advocacy for reason and science and open discourse. Apologies if my political philosophical sympathies annoy you.

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  14. Hector,

    I know, I don't do that on purpose. I don't want people to think that I do this for any other reason that I think it's a good service to the community.

    Eamon,

    no worries, my original comment was in jest too.

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  15. Hector: I agree with you on both points (i.e. including your lexical one). I would only add that some policies are more time-tested than others, and thereby yield more predictable results. And, of course, had they never been introduced in the first place (if only as minor, incremental reforms), we would never have had any empirical data with which to work.

    Eamon: Fascist regimes are militaristic, and we all know how war economies (including those of the US, UK, France, etc.) entail greater economic roles for the state (e.g. planning and rationing). But a war economy (even a fascist one) still leaves a lot of room for the kinds of economic traits ("capital investments are determined via private decision-making...") that we (at least in my circles) typically associate with capitalism.

    Nonetheless, I would agree with you insofar as the economic policies of those fascist regimes were by no means "liberal" according to the ideals of laissez-faire. But, then, neither are the more prosperous (and politically free) economies of today's Europe, yet what a qualitative difference!

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  16. Actually, I fail to see how a real world liberal arts education will help, specifically. At its best, ANY education will help with the issues you talk about above. Where science (or scientia) and the arts differ is that in the former, given assumptions, there is always a correct answer. If you disagree with the assumptions, you can still learn logic etc.
    In the arts, there are no right answers a lot of the time. While in the best of all worlds, that would be great for learning, I haven't met many teachers who could convey that. Quite the opposite, arts teachers came across as the most dogmatic ("This is good literature and that is why you have to read it. Being fun or even making sense is not a requirement of good art.") That is not really surprising: modern education is an industry - very limited ressources for a lot of output.

    To summarize my point: stepping up on liberal arts education is not going to help, since you cannot teach the humanities well in an industrial education setting. First, you would have to change the setting (small classes, engaged and undogmatic teachers, engaged students (!)), which would mean putting tons more money into the system. And then it wouldn't matter what you teach, as long as you teach kids to think on their own. You can do that in mathematics just as well as in literature. (Or is mathematics a humanity? The science/scientia thing always confuses me.)

    Cheers
    Chris

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  17. Chris, you're German, aren't you? If so, then I wonder if could summarize what sorts of structural changes the Germans made after WWII to guard against the emergence of another Nazi-like movement? I'm vaguely aware of some legal prohibitions (e.g. against hate speech), but surely there were changes in the school curricula, as well, which would speak directly to this topic.

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  18. mufi, that's not so easily answered. The overt structural changes were mostly in the legal and political area; the constitution of the FRG is a lot robuster against "hostile takeovers" (the Weimarer Constitution basically allowed the president to suspend itself temporarily). Any party that openly opposes the basic liberal democratic order (that is a translation, remember that liberal means something different in Europe) can and will be banned from participating in elections. There is nothing preventing a party from turning nasty once they are elected, but besides being hard to imagine how that would work, there are some parts of the constitution, basically our Bill of Rights, that are extremely hard to change.

    As for school curricula, I doubt they changed radically. After WWII, everything overtly brown was purged from civil service, but a lot of the people making the curricula were the same. The big changes came in 68, mostly affecting the universities (the discussion of that paradigm shift would be a whole separate thread of the type we had elsewhere ;-) ).

    So how does education help fight a new Nazism? Well, that burden is mostly placed on the history classes: our kids learn not only what happened, but also what led up to it etc. Other than that, I am not sure the schools per se have much to do with it. (There is a lot more to be said, e.g. our national guilt complex, but that would go way beyond the bounds of the topic.)

    Ultimately, while our school system does its part in preventing a repeat of an ugly past, on the whole is not very good. Whether the PISA tests are a good measure is debatable, but at least Germany had bad results, which is a good thing, because it finally started a discussion about necessary changes. And they are going in the IMO right direction, i.e. not toward more humanities, but toward generally better and more open teaching concepts.

    Hope that answers your question at least a bit.

    Cheers
    Chris

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  19. Chris, thanks for that account.

    Re: the question of whether the humanities per se play a part in critical thinking (CT), I think the answer is "it depends on how they're taught." I believe that my own CT skills (such as they are) were sharpened by exposure to courses in the humanities, like philosophy, history, anthropology, linguistics, and law, which have included (in varying degrees) both analytical and empirical approaches. But then it's also not hard to imagine (as you noted) their being taught in rote and doctrinaire ways.

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  20. chbieck,

    no, not *any* education will do. Nussbaum defends liberal arts because that type of curriculum includes an appreciation of cultural diversity, history, government institutions, and so on. A much more technical, job-oriented only type of program would simply not do that sort of job.

    Yes, we've all had experiences with bad teachers, but that is a different type of issue, and bad teachers will truly be found in any type of education system.

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  21. Massimo:

    I have rather request than comment. I agree with you on necessity of humanities in higher education as well as on idiocy of seeing students as customers. However I do not understand value of so called "... studies", like "Latino/Chicano study", "Black study", "Women study"...

    Based on what I read it looks more like ideology and propaganda than scholarship. Indeed there are relevant and legitimate social, political, cultural topics that deserve studying, but why not as a part of sociology, political science, history, etc.?

    Thanks, Greisha

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  22. gralm,

    > I do not understand value of so called "... studies", like "Latino/Chicano study", "Black study", "Women study"... Based on what I read it looks more like ideology and propaganda than scholarship. Indeed there are relevant and legitimate social, political, cultural topics that deserve studying, but why not as a part of sociology, political science, history, etc.? <

    I'm actually with you on that one...

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  23. Massimo:

    Could you discuss "... studies" in the separate article here or talk about that on the podcast? You professorial ability to present a concept clearly and systematically may help people understand topic better and facilitate further discussions.

    Thanks, Greisha

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  24. Yeah, I'll have to tackle that *very sensitive* issue one of these days...

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  25. "At its best, teaching humanities (and science) is precisely about encouraging students’ willingness to question authority (against Milgram type effect), to speak out even when in a minority position (contra Asch), and to appreciate differences between genders and across cultures as quintessentially human (against Zimbardo)."
    It seems as though this could be tested quite easily so tell me, have Milgram/Asch/Zimbardo-esque studies been performed on subjects with a liberal arts (as well as science) education? If so, do these support your assertion?

    I seem to remember a Zimbargo-esque study performed with undergraduates who acted just as appallingly anyone else but I may be mistaken.

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  26. Alex,

    I think you are missing the point. Nussbaum doesn't maintain that liberal arts students would be immune to Milgram type experiments. She says that that kind of education makes for a society where the conditions for real-life Milgram stuff to happen are diminished.

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  27. Ah I see, I think I'll have to read the book now!

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