As I write this, Google is just rolling out its own social network system, called the Google+ project. And one of the fascinating features is something called “Circles,” which allow you to encircle your friends and family into tight groups of favorites—making privileged or intimate communication faster and more cohesive. In the promotional video, a man describes how hesitant he is to take on new friends, because he recognizes the energy that real friendship requires. He shares his musings with us, asking himself: “Will this new person, trying to enter my circle of favorites, be worth it?” And in the end, he decides to take a chance on the new contender for circle status. Google seems to hold out the promise that we’ll be so popular in digital land, that we’ll need to carefully weigh people’s incoming supplications.
One of my younger friends excitedly told me that he was up to a thousand “friends” on Facebook. When I said, “You can’t have a thousand friends,” he took me to be questioning his veracity. But I clarified. You, or anyone else, cannot have a thousand friends because friendship is not the kind of thing that can be spread so widely. He seemed to think that since two friends are better than one, and three are better than two, then a thousand is even better. If this is where we’re heading, then we’re in trouble.
The profound need for social interaction is so nakedly clear in the new media world, that it sometimes borders on heartbreaking. Microsoft rolled out its new social media–sharing phone, targeted for Generation Y users, calling it simply “Kin.” And it promises in ads to “help you manage your social life.” Of course, the idea that your social world is “manageable” (or that it should be manageable) is extremely questionable. Managing your tribe is like managing the weather.
Our lack of meaningful tribal bonds might also play a role in the recent profusion of genealogical websites, which allow users to search and build family trees. It seems that we need more deep human contact in our lives, but it also seems dubious that the virtual world of managed “favorite circles” and “eager contenders” can ever deliver on its prosthetic promise of community.
We might talk about “tribes” loosely as the group of people in our digital social network that “like” the same music and news stories, and who write witty quips next to one another’s posts, but that is only a tribe in the most shallow sense. On social networking sites, one finds all kinds of idiosyncratic groups, like “Stepmothers who like chocolate milkshakes at 1 am while watching reruns of Oprah.”18 But a real tribe doesn’t just click approvingly on your tweets and photos. They bring you soup when you’re sick; they watch your kids in an emergency; they open professional doors for you; they rearrange their schedules for you; they protect you; they fight for you; they favor you—and you return all this hard work. Because your care, time, and energy are finite, you can only have a small tribe of favorites. The brain’s affective/emotional system, a limited resource, must glue tribes together. The digital world adds breadth but not depth to human connections (the exception is when you already have some depth with a friend in the real world and can enhance it in the digital realm).
The growing model of social interaction as controllable, comfortable, and convenient is disturbing because it suggests that relationships can be made-to-order. The computer software designer David Levy proposes, in his book Love and Sex with Robots, that in the near future many people will overcome their social anxieties by entering into intimate relations with robots.19 Levy is cheerful about the idea that outcasts will not have to get their hearts broken, their hopes dashed, their schedules inconvenienced by flesh-and-blood intimates. Technology will solve the discomforts of social life.
I’m not a Luddite, and I can’t wait for robots to clean my house, but I take umbrage at the notion that the discomforts of social life should be “fixed” with technology. We may eventually find the “always on” digital generation to be a group of wilting flowers, if they have sidestepped every uncomfortable tribal demand by technological means. It’s reminiscent of people who don’t have enough fortitude to be in a real tribe, so they surround themselves with cats and other pliable pets instead.
Being in a tribe is hard. There’s no way around that. It might even turn out that the struggle between intimates is as much a part of the affective bonding as the pleasure. But one thing is clear. If you want people to go to the wall for you (and I don’t mean your Facebook wall), then get off your computer and do something with them—preferably something high stakes, something you would only do for a favorite, something beyond what they “fairly” deserve.
The Archbishop and the Chambermaid
The impulse to equality and fairness is thought to be our highest principle, but in many specific contexts it short-circuits, loses coherence, and even violates some of our deeper values. I’ve tried to rescue nepotism from corruption, affirm justice in the absence of fairness, and praise tribal devotion in a world of strangers.
Fig. 23. William Godwin’s famous Archbishop versus Chambermaid thought experiment. I know who I’m saving. Drawing by Stephen Asma.
My hope is that other thinkers will follow my lead and try to find ways to integrate preferentialism into Western liberalism, but also adopt enough realism to acknowledge the unfixable value clashes when they arise. Tribal values certainly dominated before the rise of liberalism, and now liberalism (as the grid of impartiality) has certainly had a few centuries in the sun. It’s time, I submit, for a new injection of some old-school favoritism.
One of the architects of modern utilitarian ethics was William Godwin (1756–1836), a philosopher who formulated a famous thought experiment and is an intellectual progenitor of contemporary ethicists like Peter Singer. He asked us to imagine if you could only save one person from a burning building. One of those persons is Archbishop Fénelon and the other is a common chambermaid. Furthermore, the archbishop is just about to compose his famous work The Adventures of Telemachus (an influential defense of human rights). Now, here’s the rub. The chambermaid is your mother.
Godwin argues that the utilitarian principle (i.e., the greatest good for the greatest number) requires you to save the archbishop rather than your mother. He asks, “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my,’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”20
What magic? No magic, I submit. But everything else of value lies contained in that little word “my.”
NOTES
Chapter One
1. See Martha Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2010), 32.
2. See the conclusion section of Darwin, Descent of Man (Penguin Classics, 2004), 680.
3. See Bertrand Russell, “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” in Why I Am Not a Christian (Simon and Schuster, 1957), 34.
4. Originally published in the Partisan Review in January 1949, George Orwell’s “Reflections on Gandhi” appears in The Orwell Reader (Mariner Books, 1961), 331.
5. Ibid., 331.
6. See Joseph Lelyveld’s discussion of their friendship in Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (Knopf, 2011).
7. A more infamous tradition, social Darwinism, followed Darwin’s revolution and argued that societies should struggle for existence and engage in a survival of the fittest contest. Some economists, imperialists, and members of the leisured classes claimed that humans should indulge their natural selfishness. This lamentable tradition has a terrible track record, and one can be thankful that it is now moribund. But those who were closest to Charles Darwin, like Thomas Huxley, argued that human morality should never be modeled on the natural selection mechanism. See Huxley’s 1893 essay “Evolution and Ethics.” Darwin himself claimed that affection was part of the instinctual equipment possessed by all social animals, so selfish individualism was not the inevitable default position of going native.
8. The assumption was very strong during the heyday of social Darwinism, but of course it goes back to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and even appears (very articulately) as
far back as Glaucon’s arguments in Plato’s Republic.
9. Peter Corning’s The Fair Society (University of Chicago Press, 2011) contains many great insights and nuanced discussions about fairness. I see many shared interests between our respective projects. But he, like most egalitarians, also fails to appreciate or even notice the positive aspects of an ethics of favoritism.
10. See Lawrence Rosen, “What Is a Tribe, and Why Does It Matter?,” in The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
11. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness,” Philosophical Review 67, no. 2 (April 1958): 177.
12. In his Inequality Reexamined (Harvard University Press, 1992), philosopher and economist Amartya Sen points out that there is much confusion in political theorizing about “equality” and “fairness.” If we shift the “space” or “domain” of inquiry (the locus) of human activity, we get very different maps of inequality. An equality of income between two parties may not match equality in other important domains: happiness, liberty, rights, opportunities, and so on. Nonetheless, while acknowledging Sen’s caveat about diversity of domains, a common concern animates most liberal theorizing about egalitarianism. John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, and Sen himself are largely concerned with two things—equality of liberty/freedom and equality of primary goods.
13. Of course, egalitarianism is not as prevalent in the Bible as many assume. Right from the beginning, God favors Abel over Cain, for example, then comes Noah’s lucky break, and the entire Old Testament can be read as Yahweh taking care of his oppressed chosen people.
14. See the chapter “Inescapable Frameworks” in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1990), 9.
15. Psychologist Wendy Mogel tells this story to journalist Lori Gottlieb at the Atlantic.com, as a video companion to Gottlieb’s story “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” Atlantic, July/August 2011.
16. See Adam Bellow’s study In Praise of Nepotism (Doubleday, 2003). Bellow’s book is a sprawling history of nepotism, and while it makes some compelling points, it is largely concerned with nepotism among the aristocracy. My own interest in favoritism is more philosophical than historical, and I will emphasize how favoritism cuts across all social classes—indeed, I will contend that it thrives more in non-aristocratic classes. See my discussion of positive nepotism in low-income immigrant groups in chapter 6.
17. See Rosen, The Culture of Islam, 13.
18. Rosen continues: “In this sense corruption can be seen as interfering with ‘the game,’ as getting in the way of the formation of negotiated ties of interdependency by which society is held together and by which individuals form the associations in terms of which they are themselves known.” Ibid., 13.
19. See John Belden Scott, Images of Nepotism: The Painted Ceilings of Palazzo Barberini (Princeton University Press, 1991).
20. People frequently confuse favoritism per se with kleptocracy and corruption, but I will endeavor to disentangle them later in the book.
21. Kongzi, Analects, XIII.18.
22. Bertrand Russell, “Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness,” in Sceptical Essays (Routledge, 1977), 88.
23. Kongzi, Analects, XIV.36.
24. “Yet we must not on that account shrink from the task,” Aristotle says, “but decide the question as best we can.” See Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (Random House, 1941), bk. IX, chap. 2.
25. Ibid., bk. VIII, chap. 9.
26. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Norton, 1961), 82.
27. See Plato’s Euthyphro in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo, trans. B. Jowett (Prometheus Books, 1988), 11.
28. I regularly ask my college students if they would protect their fathers in the Euthyphro scenario. Their responses are interesting. Oftentimes students’ first responses cannot be trusted, because they’re at pains to appear virtuous and often tell teachers what they think teachers want to hear. The problem of obtaining veracity is complicated by the fact that if I press them for more “honest” answers and they change their responses (which is often the case), I may well be inadvertently “leading” them again (like a lawyer leading a jury). All that aside, they usually say that they’d protect their father if the worker’s death was accidental, but not if it was murder. When I ask them why they wouldn’t protect in the case of murder, they usually hem and haw and then say: “Well, if it was murder, then he could do it again to someone else—even murder me!” When I ask the why question to the few students who claim they’d shelter the father even in the case of murder, they usually reply simply, “Because he’s my dad.” They don’t see the need, or even the possibility, of further justification. I’m not sure whether the students’ lack of further articulation is a scarcity of cleverness, or simply the result of running into a wall of devotion so fundamental that one tolerates no further chatterings of reason and rhetoric. I suspect it’s the latter.
29. Cicero, De Officiis, 1.50.
Chapter Two
1. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Harvard University Press, 1981).
2. Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 101. I am indebted to Christina Hoff Sommers, whose article “Filial Morality” examines Singer’s thought experiment. Sommers makes a very compelling case for filial obligations as special moral relations. Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 8 (1986): 439–56.
3. See Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (Random House, 2009), 135. Singer recognizes that family bonds will usually trump the demands of strangers (as a descriptive fact of human behavior), but he draws the line when a parent’s biases provide luxuries to children while strangers starve to death. This last point is one that I agree with, but it’s unclear how Singer reconciles any family partiality with his abiding dedication to utilitarian rationality. Preference utilitarianism tries to marry the subjectivities of individual values with the demands of “greatest good” egalitarianism, but the marriage seems more like a shotgun wedding.
4. See Frans de Waal, “Sympathy,” in Good Natured (Harvard University Press, 1997).
5. Dr. Jaak Panksepp’s work has been influential on my understanding of emotions, as well as more abstruse philosophical subjects, like the brain-based core of self-consciousness. His book Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford University Press, 1998) should be required reading for psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists. My discussion of the CARE system is indebted to his book, his many scholarly papers (including “On the Embodied Neural Nature of Core Emotional Affects,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 [2005]: 158–84), and personal conversations.
6. Jaak Panksepp uses capitalized versions of these common terms to indicate specific neurochemical pathways and processes underlying observable emotional states. Rage has an observable set of animal behaviors, but RAGE is the brain-based prerequisite process that gives rise to (or accompanies) those animal behaviors. I have preserved Panksepp’s convention here because I think it’s helpful in distinguishing the observed emotions from the (less observable) brain-based affective systems, all the while maintaining the causal relatedness of the two phenomena (e.g., care and CARE).
7. The same triggering of maternal behaviors in non-mother rats can be achieved by directly injecting oxytocin (OT) into their brains (OT can’t cross the blood-brain barrier). Studies like these have also established that OT is necessary for the onset of maternal behaviors, but not the maintenance of mothering activities. Once OT flips the switch, mothering care is sustained on its own momentum, so to speak. See Thomas R. Insel, “The Neurobiology of Affiliation: Implications for Autism,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith (Oxford University Press, 2002).
8. See K. M. Kendrick, E. B. Keverne, and B. A. Baldwin, “Intracerebroventricular Oxytocin Stim
ulates Maternal Behaviour in the Sheep,” Neuroendocrinology 46 (1987): 56–61. Endocrinologists Kendrick and Keverne have published extensively in this area of study over the last two decades.
9. Oxytocin probably evolved from the ancient brain molecule vasotocin, which regulates sexual activity in reptiles. The evolution of oxytocin also reminds us of the way that natural selection conserves available resources, repurposing their original adaptive functions into new functions. The neurochemistry of mothering and nurturing seems to be a reconfiguration of sex chemistry (oxytocin plays a role in orgasm), rather than some unprecedented adaptational jump in brain chemistry. See Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, chap. 12.
10. Among mammals, infanticide is a very common albeit horrifying mechanism by which males enter a new territory and take over. When a male, whether it’s a rat or a lion, enters new territory, it usually kills the babies of the group. This activity stops breastfeeding, which causes lactation to cease in the mothers, which in turn restarts ovulation. This brutal pattern creates the opportunity for the new male to mate with the females and create a new gene line. In rats, the post-coital oxytocin spike correlates exactly with the gestation period (three weeks) of its own offspring. In other words, after sex, males calm down long enough to bond with their own offspring (not kill them), and then they slowly resume normal levels of pup killing.
11. Would it be ill-mannered to suggest that men might be better fathers if they had more sex?
12. Such similarities are technically referred to as “homologies” to indicate that they are the result of shared descent, and not merely accidental, coincidental, or analogical similarities. See my Following Form and Function (Northwestern University Press, 1996), for a history of the contentious homology issue.
13. See Alison B. Wismer Fries, T. E. Ziegler, J. R. Kurian, S. Jacoris, and S. Pollak, “Early Experience in Humans Is Associated with Changes in Neuropeptides Critical for Regulating Social Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102, no. 47 (November 2005): 17237–40.
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