Keith, you seem to attribute almost all of human behaviour
to motives like gaining status and ensuring the preservation of one's genetic
code. By your view of it, a behaviour like altruism is not something based on
morality, on wanting to do 'right' by others and wanting others to do right by
you, but something that it essentially selfish and that we can't help because we
are genetically programmed to behave that way. I simply don't buy that. Our
sense of morality and decency is ancient. It has been developed out of a vast
array of interactions over the millennia. It has been codified in religions,
philosophies, laws and institutions, and surely plays at least as important a
role in our behaviour, one to another, as our basic animal make-up. Without a
codified morality, we could not function as societies. It is what distinguishes
us from other species.
The examples you give of morals that are prefigured in our
genes are not very convincing. Both mothers and fathers have died to save their
children. And when, as in cases of intended rescues I know about, brothers have
tried to save brothers, the very last things they were thinking about was the
preservation of the family genes. As for altruistic work, I know of many people
who do things for strangers without any thought of getting something in return.
I personally am involved in a food bank, and I demand no recompense. I and the
other people who work with me just feel that it is a necessary thing to do.
My general point remains: quite apart from our genes and
what might be interpreted as our economic self-interest, we are moral creatures.
All I was suggesting in the posting you challenged was that our morality needs
to be applied more forcefully to some of the more pressing problems that
confound our economy today. Something other than rounding them up and deporting
them needs to be done for illegal immigrants who enter the rich world to do its
menial work, and something must also be done to help affected communities deal
with job-loss problems arising out of outsourcing. Perhaps because business has
become so big and powerful in society or because we have become more cynical and
less secure, we seem to have lost some of the focus that, for example,
Roosevelt, applied to the economy of his times via the New Deal and, as another
example, the Kennedys and Johnson applied to civil rights in the 1960s.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 2:16
AM
Subject: You are naive (was Re:
[Futurework] Walmart and the American dream
Ed,
At 18:04 27/10/2003 -0500, you
wrote:
I
believe I started all of this by rather innocently posting an article from
the NYTimes dealing with cheap illegal immigrant labour doing cleaning work
at Walmart. Personally, because I have first hand familiarity with
what second generations can achieve, I'm not against bringing in cheap
immigrant labour to do menial work, nor am I against sending work abroad to
India and China. What I am against is holding the threat of
deportation over immigrant labour's head and using outsourcing to undercut
domestic workers and their communities. There must be a decent and
moral way of doing both out and in sourcing. Society, acting through
its elected politicians, has to find that way and not leave it up to Walmart
and the outsourcers. The matter has to be considered as an important
political issue and not be kept hidden under the table. But perhaps
I'm being naive?
Ed
I think you are being naive. Not because you
are an innocent but because you are trying to mix morals and economics. In
truth, consumers are greedy and will always go to the cheapest sources. When
the British car industry was dying in the 1960s and early 70s in my home town
of Coventry (we had eight large factories there then: one now) and politicians
of both parties were appealing to us to "Buy British" whenever they were in
power -- with "Buy British" stickers everywhere you looked and stuck on every
conceivable product -- the very same workers who were destroying the British
car industry were also buying Japanese cars. They were there, large as
life, in the car parks of all the factories when their owners were on shift.
Why? Because Japanese cars were better and cheaper.
And why were
Coventry car factories destroyed (the last remaining one -- Jaguar -- is due
to move abroad shortly)? Because the car workers were greedy (they were
already earning twice or thrice the average UK wage for those days) and the
local management was weak. I know because I worked in one of the factories for
many years.
We all deplore the demise of the corner shop, yet we
(Bathonians, at least) all do the bulk of our weekly shopping in the
superstores because there's more choice, the food is cheaper and the quality
is more reliable. When I first came to live in my present house in Bath 17
years ago there were five corner shops (literally) at the end of the road --
greengrocer, butcher, grocer, newsagent, post office. They've all gone now.
What we have now is a deli (in truth, a posh takeaway) and four antique shops,
mainly for the benefit of tourists. Yet another dagger in the heart of the
local community.
We don't have much by way of morals -- but all are
deeply prefigured in our genes. They are:
1. A mother (but not a
father) will give her life in sacrifice for her children in an emergency; in a
period of starvation, however, she will allow her child to die instead of
herself. (Why? Because she has a chance of having more children if and when
the starvation period goes -- otherwise, both might die. Observe any and every
TV clip you see of mass starvation, as in Ethiopia and northern
Africa.);
2. An individual will help another within his family in order to
maximise the survival of his/her particular cluster of genes;
3. An
individual will help another in his community (that is, when there is a fair
chance that the help can be reciprocated sooner or later either by the
recipient or by an observer in that community);
4. An individual will tend
to trust another (friend or stranger) in any transaction if there is an almost
certain chance of reciprocation either immediately or at some stage in the
future;
5. It is permissable to use every trick in the book (that one can
get away with) to raise one's status in the community because in this way one
is able to choose a beautiful and talented sex partner with survival-worthy
genes for your offspring.
The first three are called altruism; the
fourth is called trade, the last is called art and/or science and/or
philosophy and/or organised religion (another version of politics) and/or
politics and/or economics and/or consumerism.
This may seem a bleak
list -- and so it is, because, ever since we left hunter-gatherer times (after
having extinguished most of the easily-available animal prey) the majority of
the world's population are either suffering physically or are experiencing
unhappiness. Even the 'prosperous' developed world is becoming increasingly
stressful and will probably become increasingly divisive (both
inter-nationally and intra-nationally). It will always be so -- until we have
a more realistic notion of what sort of creature we are and are able to
fashion our social and political units more in accordance with our genetic
make-up. Until then, I'm afraid, it's all pie in the sky.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
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