A friend convinced me to go see I Am yesterday, a documentary that hasn’t been getting much exposure, as far as I’ve seen. He also asked for my comments. So I wrote him a ridiculously long email, and since I haven’t blogged in a while, decided post it here as well. Here goes…

I appreciated the example of the deer using a ‘pointing’ algorithm to decide which water hole to go to and when – that was data I wasn’t aware of and it was nice to see yet another example of ‘democracy’ in the wild. And I agree with the statement that human societies are naturally democratic, via our considerable cognitive machinery dedicated to empathy and rewarding cooperative behavior. However, that formulation only applies to people we can see face-to-face (I happen to be reading a book right now that discusses this topic as well). For example, there is a classic experiment in behavioral economics in which two subjects are paired. Subject A is given $10, and told that he can offer any part of it to subject B. B can either accept the offer or reject it, in which case neither subject gets anything. From the point of view of classical economics, subject B should accept any offer, since something is better than nothing. But that’s not what happens. If the offer is too low, B ‘punishes’ A for being selfish by canceling the deal. But that rarely happens because A usually offers $5 – A intuits that B will be upset by a lowball offer, so doesn’t take the risk. Studies of this exchange using fMRI shows that there are specific brain areas associated with “theory of mind” – forming a hypothesis about other people’s emotions and thoughts, aka empathy. In autistics these brain areas are underdeveloped, resulting in great difficulty understanding what other people are thinking or feeling. Sure enough, in the ultimatum game, autistics usually behave as classical economists, making lowball offers, and they don’t understand why their offers are rejected.

But the most interesting thing about this is that when you change the experiment slightly, by moving the subjects to different rooms where they can’t see each other, the offers A makes drop dramatically. So our empathy is largely dependent on seeing a person face to face; these brain areas don’t respond to abstract data. As another example, people are far more likely to donate to hunger charities if they are shown a picture of a single starving child, than if they are shown statistics that say 100,000,000 children are currently starving.

I ascribe most of the problems in human affairs with this fact of the brain’s architecture. Yes, we are democratic and cooperative and empathic in our localized groups, but the great bulk of humanity is too distant to stimulate those cognitive functions. Instead, we have to simulate those functions using the prefrontal cortex, which is not very reliable. The PFC is just as good at rationalizing immoral behavior as it is at evoking empathy for far-off people. The PFC is actually capable of repressing or overriding our emotional impulses – I believe that’s what happens in those notorious cases where masses of people are convinced to commit horrendous acts.

It’s not a surprise that the first formal codes of law were enacted by the first cities; laws were not needed until people found themselves living among strangers. Law is an attempt to bring to our behavior among strangers the same fairness that naturally arises in our dealings with those who are close to us. Incidentally, I am very wary of these Utopian characterizations of Native Americans before the whites arrived. I don’t doubt that within their tribes there was democracy and cooperation, but there is plenty of evidence that between tribes there was antagonism and warfare. Certainly, the same race of people, a thousand miles to the south, constructed a complex urban society that had exactly the same injustices and divisive social classes that were seen in European, Asian, and African societies of similar size and complexity.

In other words, I don’t believe that capitalism and global geopolitics as they stand today are some strange perversion of our “true selves.” I believe if you seeded 1000 earth-like planets with stone-age humans and waited a few thousand years, you would see the same pattern arise again and again.

The good news is that we are capable, more or less, of devising rational systems to try to patch over this flaw in our cognitive architecture. That’s what the law is. (It’s also what the great religions are about – ethics and morality lie at the very center of them, much moreso than ‘tribal’ religions). And the prevalence of mass media helps immensely with this – it allows us to come ‘face-to-face’ with distant people. The cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker did some research which he believes shows that despite appearances, humanity as a whole is becoming much less violent. Our wars are bigger and more destructive, but a random individual’s chance of dying by violence is lower than any time in human history. And the whole concept of universal human rights is quite new. I attribute this to globalization and our increasing ability to ‘see’ into lives very far from us.

So I guess I’d say I’m wary of pseudo-spiritual claims that all we need to do is learn to love each other. That’s certainly true, but all our great moral thinkers have understood that for thousands of years. (Liza leaned over to me in the middle of the movie and said, “Would you like to hear the one-word title for this movie? Buddhism.”) It would be nice to think that once enough of us are giving off an emotional magnetic field of positivity, some critical mass will be reached and everything will suddenly shift. I certainly hope so. And the film did make me think again about my personal contribution to this equation. (Also, it was very nice in that it reinforced a shift that I’ve been undergoing recently – away from my former cynicism about whether film and books have any genuine effect on anyone…) But OSD was conceived to be very pragmatic – its an attempt to pack more fairness into society by diffusing power more widely across it. It’s pretty hard to maintain a general positivity toward your fellow man when you see an exalted class screwing you and getting away with it. There will always be people with high levels of “Social Dominance Orientation,” as the term was coined by Bob Altemeyer, and they will always seek to exploit the loopholes in the social fabric for their own aggrandizement. OSD attempts to create a social fabric with fewer loopholes.

(I also appreciated the characterization of people like the Koch brothers as ‘mentally ill’ – I don’t know if that’s literally true, but to some degree mental illness is socially constructed, so I say we take that ball and run with it. Seriously, what else can you can call someone who has a $20 billion fortune and thinks all the cards are stacked against him?)

Gosh, so much more I could say, but I’ve spent a long time on this already…