Survival of the Moral-ist

Deontology is just your genetic instincts talking, and the only things your instincts care about are the strategies that caused your ancestors to successfully create you.

Deontology is usually defined as, “It’s moral because I say so!”

Before you laugh, try to explain why you don’t give your children up for adoption to a poor infertile couple that desperately wants children, and then send all of your now freed-up money to poor children in Africa.

“Because they are my children, you fucker,” I hear you thinking.

But wouldn’t net utility be higher, both for the couple (who would no doubt be very loving and kind to your children) and for the children in Africa?

Now you growl and reach for the nearest thing that could conceivably be used as a weapon. “MY CHILDREN.”

Consequentialism was a fairly solid stab at trying to figure out why people hold certain deontologic moral instincts, but being ignorant of genetics (until recently), sometimes turned up funny results that contradicted people’s instincts. Like the idea that you really should send as much money as possible to Africa.

Evolutionary theory provides a framework that makes people’s deontological claims make sense. “Morality” is just a sense we have evolved to help us distinguish between actions that will generally lead to your descendants existing and actions that generally won’t. People whose instincts led them to act contrary to their genetics’ interests just didn’t pass on their ideas about morality.

BIG NOTE: Different environments and tech levels will create different pressures on people that result in different moralities. When people from different cultures act differently, people are tempted to say, “those people are immoral,” but they may just have moral instincts that evolved to maximize survival under a different set of conditions.

For example, polygamy is viewed as morally acceptable in many warm or tropical parts of the world, while monogamy is strongly favored in colder parts. This may be a result of the environment favoring different crop-raising strategies–in the north, farmers had to employ intensive agricultural techniques to produce enough food to keep them alive over the long winters. One woman working alone had little hope of raising enough food to feed her children. By contrast, in places with little to no winter, a single woman could raise most of the food necessary to feed her children. With each woman more or less raising her children independently, one man could “afford” more wives–and so did, if he could. Taken far enough, men and women might not need to marry at all.

It’s a theory; someone could test it pretty easily.

By this conception, neither group is acting more morally–they just have different conditions.

If we apply this concept of morality–that when people say “moral,” they really mean, “in your genes’ interests,” a lot of things people say and do that sound nonsensical or hypocritical suddenly reveal an underlying logic. For example, if someone says, “drugs are immoral,” what they really mean is, “drugs have negative effects on your ability to raise children.” (People generally agree that drug use is fine if it enhances your ability to function, or at least does not impair it.) If someone says, “homosexuality is immoral,” what they really mean is, “gay sex doesn’t produce offspring.”

And you are not going to give up your children for adoption because historically, people who abandoned their children did not become your ancestors, because their children all died, and so you have a very strong instinct that kicks in and says DO NOT DO THIS NO MATTER WHAT.

As I noted earlier, liberals and conservatives (most likely) have a different pattern of genetic relatedness to others, leading to different approaches to morality. Conservative morality tends to benefit one’s immediate family, community, ethnos, nation, etc., in roughly concentric circles of obligation and commitment. Most conservatives have little moral concern for people outside their own group, but would die for the people they love. This is a result of the pressures of the environment conservatives are adapted to/were produced by.

Liberals have a different set of values, again, produced by the environment that produced them. Liberals tend to favor defining morality in terms of utilitarian calculi about the “greatest good,” which aids in the creation of large, economically complex societies where you can basically trust strangers not to fuck you over.

Of course, since liberals reproduce less than conservatives, there’s a good chance their morals will just be replaced by conservative morals–I don’t know how robust viral-meme liberalism will be as mitochondrial-meme liberalism collapses.

Memetic Separatism => Ethnicity (part 2 of the meme posts)

So, as I was saying, before I had to run off…

Meme Mitochondrias reproduce primarily by hitching a ride on human reproduction. Success, therefore, optimizes them to encourage human reproduction.
Meme mitochondrias do not optimize for pleasure.

Meme Viruses reproduce by convincing people to adopt them.
Success, therefore, optimizes them to encourage pleasure or beneficial habits.
Meme viruses do not optimize for human reproduction.

Memes can switch forms–Christianity was originally spread as a virus, but quickly became mitochondrial. Today, with church membership waning across the US (and the Rest of the West,) American churches are campaigning actively for more Hispanic members via immigration reform–failure of mitochondrial mode leads to activation of viral mode.

Mormonism has spread particularly well because it employs both modes.

One of the conclusions I draw from this is that mitochondrial memes will tend to look rather unpleasant to people. Few people will adopt these memes if exposed to them after childhood, and many people raised with these memes will “defect”.

EG, being Amish. The Amish community has had significant out-migration over the years–about 25% each generation, from what I’ve heard–but almost zero in-migration. Being Amish simply isn’t attractive to terribly many non-Amish. (By contrast, being an American is attractive to millions of non-Americans.)

The Amish continue to exist because they have tons of children–enough children to replace the defectors (and then some.) To put it in numbers:

If the average Amish woman had 2 children, and 25% of Amish children defected during Rumspringa, the effective TFR would be only 1.5 children per woman, and the population would quickly shrink.
If the average Amish woman has 4 children, and 25% defect, the effective TFR remains 3 children per woman, and the population still grows.

We can call this process, “boiling off”. Over time, the Amish who are most inclined toward the outside world are most likely to boil off, while the most Amishy-Amish are most likely to stay, leading to an ever-more distinctive Amish population.

Genetically, the Amish and non-Amish Pennsylvanians are quite distinct, despite 25% or so of Amish out-migrating each generation.

(I have recently seen people commenting upon a quote attributed to Ben Franklin that complained about the Germans in Pennsylvania, as proof that people have historically been bigoted and over-reacted to new immigrants. I think it entirely possible, though, that Franklin was basically correct–having a bunch of people around who set up ethnically-exclusive communities and are explicitly opposed to interacting with the broader culture could actually be problematic.)

We would also expect the dominant narrative outside of any particular mitochondrial meme complex (ie ethnic culture) to be heavily influenced by the accounts of deserters–people who did not like that society. By contrast, people within an ethnic culture probably tend to like it (they tend to be the people who did not defect, after all.) Non-Amish find the Amish lifestyle boring and exhausting, but the Amish probably actually like it.

A similar case study is Judaism. Memetically speaking, Judaism is strongly mitochondrial. (It once spawned a viral offspring, called Christianity. This was very bad, as the newly infected could not recognize carriers of the parent meme as members of their viral community, and so kept trying to infect or exterminate them.)

There is an axiom in regular evolutionary science that two closely related species (or sub-species) cannot occupy the same environmental niche. Either one group will out-compete the other, thus replacing it, or the two groups will merge.

Is there no hope for an equilibrium solution, with neither replacement nor merger?

If the two groups have different behaviors, then sooner or later, one group will get the upper hand (or claw, paw, wing, or fin,) and out-compete the other, (or their behavior will steer them into a different environmental niche.) If the two groups have identical behaviors, then they will not be able to distinguish between each other as mates and will merge. (If they are genetically incapable of mating, then they will also be genetically incapable of performing the same behaviors, and we are back to out-competing.)

Among humans, people who possess similar values and behaviors (that is, culture, that is, memes,) tend to mate with each other, leading to genetically distinct groups of people.

In the absence of a physical barrier (like being on isolated island for a few thousand years,) memes create ethnicity. A coherent meme-system is a culture.
Cultures contain both mitochondria and virus memes, eg., Americans value democracy (virus) and monogamous marriages (mitochondrial).

Back to the Jews. The Jews have managed to exist for thousands of years (despite some pretty big obstacles,) and are genetically distinct from their neighbors, despite tremendous out-migration over the years. The Ashkenazi, for example, have very little German DNA, despite having lived in Germany for, what, about 800 years? (Rather, they’re about half Italian, mostly along their maternal lines, surprising no one who has ever observed immigrants.) Today, out-marriage among American Jews is estimated around 50%.

Looking at the behavior of the various major Jewish denominations in the US, the haredi Jews operate much like the Amish–they have a bunch of children, about 25% of whom defect to other Jewish denominations, and receive very few formerly-Conservative or Reform Jews into their ranks. Being haredi just isn’t attractive to people who aren’t born into it–it’s mitochondrial. However, the ranks of haredi Jews are still growing, due to their extremely high fertility rates.

Reform and Conservative Judaism, by contrast, receive continual infusions of new members from ex-haredim. However, their fertility rates are very low (by contrast.) They are dependent on “converts” in order to continue to exist. Therefore, they are viral, not mitochondrial.

The endpoint of this progression is obvious: Reform, Reconstructionist, and Atheist Jews who marry non-Jews and whose children and grandchildren cease being Jewish.

Incidentally, if you want your descendants to be Jewish, you must teach your children mitochondrial Judaism. Virus-Judaism is too similar to non-Judaism to maintain ethno-cultural separatism.

How can this be, if Jews have been so separate over the years?

Before Napoleon invaded the rest of Europe and imposed the aptly named Code Napoleon, Jews and Christians throughout Ashkenazi lands were legally forced into separate communities and professions, eg, the Prague Ghetto. This means they were forced into different niches, and just like birds cracking different nuts developing different beaks, we should expect to see the development of different norms, values, and skills suited to their particular niches (and a quick examination of the professions available in the Ashkenazi niche explains their development of higher IQs than other Europeans.)

Napoleon was defeated, but his Code remained, emancipating the Jews across much of Europe. With the legal restrictions gone, the two groups now occupied–more or less–the same niche. The two groups must either compete, merge, or find new niches.

The rates of out-migration, even in the 1800s in Germany, were apparently tremendous, at least according to the Jewish sources I have read on the matter. (My and my spouses’ DNA attests to this.) Like the Amish, would expect the out-migration to leave behind a remnant population that is less interested in being like the non-Jewish world. In the Ghetto days, a more liberal or atheist Jew would have been forced by circumstances to marry another Jews, probably one more religious than themselves, and their children would have reverted to the norm. More devout Jews would have been likely to marry not as devout as themselves Jews, again returning their children toward the norm.

Without the Ghetto, the less-religious marry out, and the more-religious marry each other, the only folks left. The probable result: a (growing) remnant population of increasingly haredi Jews on the one hand, and an assimilationist group whose meme-virus begins to look increasingly similar to the more secular branches of Christianity, like Unitarian Universalism.

For obvious reasons, the haredim will come to “represent” what Judaism “means” in people’s imaginations, because the assimilationist Jews simply aren’t distinct enough to be viewed as a separate group.

(Unfortunately, I would not be surprised to see American Ashkenazi IQ plummet over the next century toward the American norm, since being haredi selects more for ability to birth lots of children than IQ, and the most intelligent Jews tend to be atheists or something close to it.)

Or to put it another way, once the Ashkenazim and Christians begin occupying the same niche and inter-marrying, they adopt new meme viruses to support their new behavior patterns, and people and their spouses will want to adopt the same viruses so they can have the same behavior. Otherwise, it’s not going to work. If I want to send my kids to Hindu School, and you want to send them to Catholic School, we’re going to have a conflict. If we declare that Jesus is just an avatar of Vishnu, then we have eliminated the conflict. Our ideas (and thus our genes) have merged.

We can also see this working on a broader scale–eg, modern transportation makes it pretty easy for disaffected Texans to move to Massachusetts.

Conservative American culture is more mitochondrial–they have more babies, outsiders find their culture oppressive, and I bet you the children of conservatives are more likely to become liberals than vice versa.

Liberal culture is more viral. Liberals often forgo reproducing entirely, preferring instead to spread their ideas by talking about them. This leads to people referring to liberals as “defectors” or “traitors”. (I would rather conceptualize them as allying, but perhaps that is me being overly optimistic.)

With no credible outside threat to force Americans to unite, liberals would rather unite with other liberals and define themselves in contrast to conservatives than cooperate with (and occasionally marry) conservatives (and vice versa.) (While liberals definitely report more positive views on interracial marriage than conservatives, I should note that the actual statistics on interracial marriage and multi-ethnic households may lean just slightly toward the conservatives–possibly because of class stratification and geography in America making liberals less likely to actually interact with ethnic minorities, and possibly because Conservatives adopt more kids, often internationally.)

Results:
1. Liberal culture assimilates with cultures not traditionally part of the American mainstream, like African American, European, or Asian cultures (eg, liberals are more likely to have adopted the Asian norm of removing their shoes upon entering the house, and are more likely to pride themselves on watching foreign movies.)

2. Conservative culture becomes a remnant, like the Amish or Haredi Jews. And like them, the Conservatives become the cultural “symbol” of what it “means” to be American.

3. Liberals become very uncomfortable with identifying as “American” because it now represents “conservative” to them. I’m pretty sure that liberals who fought in the trenches of WWII self-identified pretty strongly as “American”, and believed that America was a great and glorious country out to make the world a better place by defeating the Nazis and Japanese. Modern American liberals quite frequently report being “ashamed” of being Americans, and cringe (or mock) the sight of a bald eagle alighting on an American flag hoisted aloft by Jesus delivering the Constitution to the Founding Fathers.

Conservatives, meanwhile, wish Liberals would pack up and leave already.

4. Liberalism requires a constant influx of new believers, otherwise “liberal” will shift consistently rightward due to low liberal birthrates. (Conservatives, by contrast, are closer to replacement.) It is therefore perhaps not coincidental that liberals push strongly for the incorporation of new groups of people into the country–people who will probably vote liberal, at least for a while.

There is one complication I have basically been glossing over: genetics influence your meme preferences. People with a genetic propensity toward anger will probably prefer memes that are pro-anger/violence. People with a genetic propensity toward empathy will probably prefer memes that emphasize the importance of empathizing with others. Nice people talk about how much they like Gandhi; jerks appreciate Hitler. People with larger amygdalas have stronger disgust reactions and are more likely to be conservatives and neophobic. People with smaller amygdalas think that eating raw fish sounds like it could be fun, rather than revolting. Some people are more genetically inclined to pick up new ideas, while others are more “immune” to them.

An interesting case of “immunity” is the general Western reaction to Christianity in the past few decades. Westerners are leaving Christianity in droves, (much like Judaism,) but Christianity will likely continue in this country because the new population of Hispanics is much less immune.