Psychology

Cal Godot asked a good question in response to last weekend's post. When I use the terms "will" and "desire" in the context of ethical philosophy, am I using the terms interchangeably?

Yes, in a strict logical sense, I am using the terms interchangeably. Both "will" and "desire" point to the same thing, the same mysterious and omnipresent phenomenon of human (and animal) life. Yet there is a world of difference between will and desire.

The difference is not in the thing the words points to, but in the connotations captured along the way. The term "will" calls to mind three provocative philosophical texts that have become classics of the modern Western tradition: Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Presentation, Friedrich Nietzsche's The Will to Power and William James's essay collection The Will to Believe. Thus, "will" connotes European romanticism, existentialism and American Pragmatism. It carries a muscular, vigorous, dramatic and conflict-ridden sense. It feels Napoleonic and Apollonian.

"Is reading social?" The question has been going around the litsphere, though many who have answered have reached for a middle ground between the disconcerting idea of social (and Internet-connected) literature and the more traditional notion of reading as an intensely private and solitary activity. I don't see much need for middle ground here -- I think the question is an open-and-shut case.

Reading is intensely social, and it's barely anything but social, and it has always been so. I know this because I know what reading feels like: when I read another person's book, I am engaging in a sharing of thoughts with this person. It doesn't make much difference, when I read Moby Dick, that Herman Melville has been dead for a long time. It's not his dead voice I find in the book; to the extent that I am reading him, I am encountering him in full. To read another person's words is to conduct a meeting of the minds. Is reading an intensely private activity? Well, sure, your reading life is private, just like your sex life is private. But it's not the least bit solitary (if it were, it wouldn't be reading, and it wouldn't be sex).

Reading is also social for another reason: almost all books are about people. Specifically, they're about people being social. If you read a chapter or a story that takes place at a dinner party, you are experiencing that dinner party vicariously. You laugh when a character is funny, wince when someone gets hurt, miss them all when they're gone. If the writer you are reading has mediocre talent, you may not experience their dinner party vividly, but if the writer is a master, it may be one of the best parties of your life. It's possible to quibble that this type of imaginary engagement is only social by proxy. But every reader knows it doesn't feel like proxy when we're in the middle of it.

I'm searching for a bright light of truth among the hip young "public philosophers" selling books today. Last weekend, we admired Alain De Botton's sensitive style but worried that he might be the Martha Stewart of philosophy. This weekend, I'd like to look at a harder-hitting upstart, Sam Harris, whose key ethical work is The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.

I got off to a bad start with Sam Harris in 2004 when he rose to fame with an angry book called The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason that identified fundamentalist religion (particularly radical Islam) as a major source of the world's problems. Harris was part of a wave of new atheists, including Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and eventually Christopher Hitchens, who posited Osama bin Laden as the reductio ad absurdum of all organized religion, a formula I completely disagree with (I'm quite sure that "religious hatred" is only a surrogate for ethnic or national hatred, and I suspect that guerrophiles like Osama bin Laden have little authentic interest in religion to begin with).

So I avoided Sam Harris's early books, but he may be improving. His 2010 Moral Landscape is worth digging into and taking quite seriously. This book lays out an extended argument for the real existence of a concrete and universal moral code that could, if properly expressed and understood, significantly, improve the world. This is the kind of ambition I like to see in an ethical philosopher.

The primary challenge facing Sam Harris in this book is not to define a concrete and universal moral code -- not surprisingly, he resorts to a John Stuart Mill-ish Utilitarian approach -- but rather to show that a concrete and universal moral code is possible at all. Harris presents a clear argument for the positive conclusion here, which I will paraphrase as follows:

When I write about the concept of the group mind, I'm often misunderstood to be advocating for collectivism. In fact, I would never bother advocating for collectivism, because collectivism doesn't need an advocate.

The impulse to groupthink has us all in its grip, every moment of our lives -- whether we like it or not, and whether we admit it or not.  We can try to better understand the ways that social psychology affects the individual decisions we make and the private feelings we feel, but it is not in our power to remove these societal influences from our lives.  We might just as well try to survive without breathing air.

In the past week, the story of the murder of young African-American Trayvon Martin by an overzealous "Neighborhood Watch" volunteer named George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida has shocked many Americans.  The first shock is the injustice of the crime -- a friendly, helpless kid, armed with a deadly Skittle, falling into the crosshairs of a wannabe hero with a gun, a racist eye, and way too much time on his hands.

But George Zimmerman's crime is not an individual crime, and the shadowy fingerprints of the "group mind" are all over this case.  Zimmerman was policing a residential area that identified itself as a gated community, and it was his membership in this gated community's "Neighborhood Watch" program that made him feel empowered to shoot at a stranger.  When the Sanford police arrived at the scene of the crime, the officers amazingly came to the conclusion that Zimmerman must have been justified in shooting Martin, and even the top leadership of the police force concurred with this decision.  What seems at first to be the murderous act of a single deluded man turns out to be the deadly delusion of an entire city.