Origins of Compassionlessness

My home blog, Concurring Opinions, allows anonymous and basically unmoderated comments.  Though such commentary can get sarcastic and occasionally vicious, I think it helps one to get an inside view of what people are *really* thinking about certain controversies.  The internet's "Ring of Gyges," on disturbing display during the recent AutoAdmit controversy, can also unveil the preferences usually deemed too mean-spirited or raw to disclose in polite company. 

Consider the following anonymous comment supporting the recent SCHIP veto:

Why should I be forced to pay because other people can't properly provide for their children? 

I'm wondering--given all the accounts of good, hardworking people unable to afford health care, how do views like this solidify? 

Perhaps one key driver here is the increasing insecurity--of income, position, insurance status--everyone in the U.S. is feeling as globalization advances.   One response to that kind of insecurity is to try to develop a solidaristic attitude of mutual aid. But evolutionary biologist David Barash has noted the all-too-human origins of an opposed response:

When an individual suffers pain, he most often responds by passing it on to someone else. When possible, that "someone else" is the perpetrator, the original source of the pain. But if this cannot be achieved, then others are liable to be victimized, regardless of innocence.

Redirected aggression does not simply derive from irrationality or human nastiness, but — along with retaliation and revenge — is entrenched in the very fabric of the natural world, part of a continuum involving nature's response to pain. The biology of redirected aggression goes a long way toward explaining not only its apparent senselessness but its universality as well. It shows up across the ages, as we've seen, across cultures, and across social units, from individuals to communities to nations.

Barash presents yet more reason to doubt the famous Marxist immiseration hypothesis (and to embrace Tocqueville's idea of the revolution of rising expectations).  Marx claimed that worsening conditions for workers would ultimately redound to their benefit as they finally revolted against a system that exploited them.  But Barash's sociobiology suggests just the opposite consequence of immiseration: a desire to lash out against someone, anyone, who can be seen as a burden.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Frank,

Marx's theory of communist revolution was not simply or strictly about the immiseration of workers and to the extent that it was, we need to keep in mind the important distinction between "relative" and "absolute" immiseration, which means workers need not be impoverished, just that they remain exploited vis-a-vis capitalists. The *causes* of the communist revolution were thought to be alienation, economic crises, exploitation and the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production. The *outcome*, in Elster's words, is described as "permitting the full and equal self-realization of individuals." As to the *process* itself, this bears upon the motivation of workers inasmuch as it is tied to the formation of class consciousness and class struggle. Again, Elster: "On the one hand, Marx was so persuaded of the necessary advent of communism that he neglected to explain how the various *reasons* for introducing it could also have *motivating* efficacy. On the other hand he tended to see all the defects of capitalism as so intimately connected with one another that he did not bother to sort them out from another." As for the point about relative immiseration: "By and large, Marx did not condemn capitalism on the grounds that it led to increased misery in the sense of lower levels of consumption or, somewhat more generally, a lower standard of living. True, he wrote in terms of glowing indignation about the conditions of the English working class, but not to suggest that they were getting worse. His standard of comparison was counterfactual, not actual. He compared the fate of the workers in actually existing capitalism with what it would be under more rationally organized relations of production. Lack of need satisfaction has been an inescapable fact for most people throughout history. It becomes scandalous only when the objective possibility emerges of a society in which the full and free use of one's powers is in the reach of all. Similarly, the suboptimality of capitalism with respect to technical change did not mean the innovations were coming to a stop. On the contrary: the fall in the rate of profit made the capitalists innovate at an ever more frenetic pace. Rather, the point is that capitalism itself creates the conditions under which another system can perform even better. Alienation and 'the contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production' are defined as gaps between what is actual and what is possible. Alienation, broadly speaking, is predicated on the basis of a possible better *use* of the productive forces, and the contradiction on the basis of a possible faster *development*."

So, it seems Marx too understood something about the role of rising expectations (created by capitalism)....

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

What is termed "redirected aggression" here was earlier spoken of by Erich Fromm (among others of his generation) as "defensive aggression." After a discussion of this in the non-human animal world, wherein the neurophysiological basis of aggression is said to be "biologically adaptive" because of its defensive nature and the fact that its overall aim is "the preservation of life," Fromm says "man, too, is phylogenetically programmed to react with attack or flight if his vital interests are threatened. Even though this innate tendency operates less rigidly in man than in lower animals, there is no lack of evidence that man tends to be motivated by his phylogenetically prepared tendency for defensive aggression when his life, health, freedom, or property (in those societies in which private property exists and is highly valued) are threatened. To be sure, this reason can be overcome by moral or religious convictions and training, but it is in practice the reaction of most individuals and groups. In fact, defensive aggression accounts for most of man's aggressive impulses." Fromm proceeds to explain why the incidence of this defensive aggression is many times greater in man than in non-human animals:

"[M]an, being endowed with a capacity for foresight and imagination, reacts not only to present dangers and threats or to memories of dangers and threats but to the dangers and threats he can imagine as possibly happening in the future. He may conclude, for instance, that because his tribe is richer than a neighboring tribe that is well trained in warfare, the other will attack his own sometime from now. [....]

Man is capable not only of foreseeing *real* dangers in the future; he is also capable of being persuaded and brainwashed by his leaders to see dangers when in reality they do not exist. [....]

Man, like the animal, defends himself against threat to his vital interests. *But the range of man's vital interests is much wider than that of the animal.* [....] First of all, man has a vital interest in retaining his frame of orientation. His capacity to act depends on it, and in the last analysis, his sense of identity. If others threaten him with ideas that question his own frame of orientation, he will react to these ideas as to a vital threat. He may rationalize this reaction in many ways. He will say that the new ideas are inherently 'immoral,' 'uncivilized,' 'crazy' [Fromm wrote this in 1973], or whatever else he can think of to express his repugnance, but this antagonism is in fact aroused because *he* feels threatened." For more, please see his The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973. While falling well short of a full-fledged psychoanalytic theory as envisaged, say, by neo-Freudians, this book nonetheless contains much of enduring relevance.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Frank,

I should have mentioned that my comments in no way detract from the significance of your main points. Furthermore, you do an enviable job of rationally responding with patience and temperance to some rather hard-headed interlocutors over at CO and other blogs graced by your presence, and thus provide us with an exemplary model of what intelligent, compassionate and timely blogging is all about.