The
Elephant Whisperer:
This is how reason works.
By
Martin
L. Cowen III
“A person cannot change
his own elephants. Why would he want to?” This essay will explain this claim.
The context for this
essay is our two-months-long project: “Does Reason Work?” As the Fellowship of Reason®
we have a more than passing interest in the question. We are enjoying a series
of meetings to address the question. At our first meeting we brainstormed for
issues about which people have differing opinions to discover an interesting
issue to resolve among ourselves using reason. We identified a topic. Our next
meeting we will discuss strategies to resolve the issue. Our goal is to change
the hearts and minds of one or more participants. Our first effort is to
collect facts and other information that might have a bearing on the issue.
Once we learn some facts about the issue, then we will determine how to proceed
to a resolution of the issue. We want to determine whether, in a single case—one
issue, one changed mind—whether, in fact, reason can work.
A member suggested that
a new book, The Righteous Mind, might
have bearing on our efforts.
This essay continues
our work with the ideas of Jonathan Haidt from his new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are
Divided by Politics and Religion (2012). Professor Haidt tells us that
there are six evolutionarily derived moral modules: care/harm,
fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, sanctity/degradation,
authority/subversion, and liberty/oppression. These moral modules are emotional
centers that are, on the whole and for the most part, permanently set (after
reaching stable adulthood) in each of us and very difficult, if not impossible,
to change.
Haidt calls himself a
Humean. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) famously claimed that
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never
pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” David Hume’s skeptical
view is rather lamentable for a person who hopes to change the hearts and minds
of others from error to the truth. (A skeptic would have put truth in quotes thus: “truth.” A skeptic
blithely states: “It is True that there is no “Truth.”) Jonathan Haidt, who is
not as skeptical as David Hume, holds out hope that science, as an institution,
can, using reason, move people toward the truth.
Haidt has two useful
metaphors. The first metaphor: Our emotions are like an elephant whose rider is
reason. The rider’s influence over the elephant is very limited. The second
metaphor: Our emotions are like the client of a lawyer. The lawyer represents
reason. The lawyer (reason) can advise the client (emotions), but in the end,
the client (who is the boss) can do as he wishes despite the lawyer’s advice.
Reflective people who
have experienced low blood sugar can appreciate the power of emotion (chemical
processes analogous or identical to emotions) over reason. During a period of
low blood sugar one can experience anxiety. The feeling of anxiety might be
attached to an otherwise meaningless event. The brain can connect the feeling
of anxiety and the meaningless event in a cause/effect way. Reason can assure
the person to a 100% certainty that there is no relation, yet the anxiety
remains and the sense of a causal relationship between the anxiety and the
meaningless event remains. Only the passage of time and the restoration of
normal blood sugar (by eating) will cure the anxiety and the false sense of
cause/effect relation between the anxiety and the meaningless event.
While scientific
progress and history move human beings toward the truth, members of the
Fellowship of Reason® might be impatient with the pace of change. Even science
has huge problems with change within a single generation.
A common idea regarding
scientific “paradigm shift” is that when a new theory is discovered the
believers in the old system do not usually change their views, rather the “old
believers” die out and the believers in the new system live on. After the “old
believers” are dead and gone, the paradigm shift is complete. Examples of
paradigm shift include the change from the geocentric view (the earth is the
center of the solar system) to the heliocentric view (the sun is the center of
the solar system); the change from the Newtonian view of physics to the
Einsteinium view of physics; and the change from the Einsteinium view of
physics to the quantum view of physics.
On January 12, 2015,
National Public Radio performed a great segment on Hungarian doctor Ignaz
Semmelweis (1818-1865). In his book Etiology, Concept and
Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever (1861), he explains that hand washing in
hospitals can save lives. Doctor Semmelweis was a baby-delivery doctor in
Vienna. He was alarmed by the mortality rate of birthing women at the hospital
and the different outcomes in the clinic attended by doctors versus the clinic
attended by midwives. The doctors were killing five times as many women as the
midwives. Doctor Semmelweis conducted a number of scientific experiments to
determine the cause. He tested for whether laying on the side or on the back
was a cause. He tested whether the ringing of a bell by the passing priest was
a cause. Finally, he determined the cause: doctors were performing autopsies of
deceased women and then delivering babies and that the midwives were not. The
doctors were not sterilizing their hands between the autopsies and the births.
Doctor Semmelweis (knowing nothing about germ theory) chose chlorine to clean
the hands. Eureka! Childbed fever decreased dramatically.
Doctor Semmelweis’
colleagues were not happy. The theory made it look like the doctors were
causing the deaths of their patients (as in fact they were). A Sacred Center for doctors is: “I save lives!” Doctor Semmelweis lost his job and doctors gave up chlorine hand-washing. Semmelweis
was committed to a mental asylum and died at age 47.
Even today, the
struggle to ensure hand washing in hospitals goes on. (Anyone who has been in a
hospital will have seen the signs encouraging the medical professionals to wash
their hands.)
We hold science and
scientists (and doctors) in the highest esteem. The point of these stories
about paradigm shift, though, is to lament the fact that scientists (and
doctors) are human beings, “all too human.”
In the previous essay,
we used the Sacred Center of Science as our first example of Sacred
Centers precisely because scientists (and doctors), who hold most explicitly to
rational thought as a guide, would be least likely to be offended by the
suggestion that Science is a Sacred Center. (We will recall that the prior
essay suggested that we all might “Know Thyself” better if we identified our
Sacred Centers. Sacred Centers activate the sanctity/degradation moral module.
Other Sacred Centers identified were Children, Parents, Secularism, Jesus,
Mohammad, Obama, the individual’s Honor and Reputation, Philosophy, Ayn Rand,
and Vera Norman. There are certainly many Sacred Centers. We claimed in the
prior essay that our Sacred Centers are the largest elephants in the room,
always to be treated with respect and great deference, on pain of serious, even
deadly, consequences.)
Combining the
skepticism of David Hume and our faith in science, tempered by the problems
cited above concerning paradigm shift (it takes generations), is there any hope
for the impatient among us that reason might work in a matter of years, rather
than having to wait for the “old believers” to die out? That is the question
this essay hopes to answer.
There is a song lyric (Omina Sol by Z. Randall Stroope) that
indicates the widespread acceptance of the importance of emotions/passions:
Let courage be
your oar,
Let passion be
your sail,
Wisdom and truth
will guide
Your deep
heart’s yearning,
Through all
travail.
We began this essay by
claiming: “A person cannot change his own elephants.” And by asking: “Why
would he want to?”
Now we can understand
this claim. It means that an individual cannot change his own Sacred Centers or
any of his other moral modules. (As a reminder the moral modules are:
care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, sanctity/degradation,
authority/subversion, and liberty/oppression.) The reason is the rhetorical second
sentence: “Why would he want to?” There must be passion/emotion in order to
initiate action in the individual. A person’s elephants are his passions/emotions. Unless there is another elephant with a
competing passion/emotion, there can be no change of the first elephant. Change
can only come from outside an already emotionally stable individual, i.e. an
adult whose ideas are well integrated, an adult who does not harbor competing
elephants, an adult who has all his elephants in a row.
That, then, is our job
as would-be changers of hearts and minds. We must avoid offending existing
elephants and begin to build new elephants in the person whose heart and mind we
hope to change.
Doctor Semmelweis
offended the elephants of others. NPR explained that Doctor Semmelweis was not
tactful. He publicly berated people. He made influential enemies. Doctor
Semmelweis’ downfall provides immediate guidance for us would-be changers of
hearts and minds.
The secular movement
called Brights is a great example of what not to do, if we are to avoid the
mistakes of Doctor Semmelweis. Do not offend your correspondent. “I am bright (i.e. smart, intelligence,
perspicacious) and you are not,” is not an effective way to begin a persuasive
argument.
Those Libertarian
candidates who begin their campaigns with “Legalize Drugs” are not likely to go
very far. While it is a consequence of the Libertarian philosophy of individual
freedom and responsibility that people should be free to make even
self-injurious choices and take personal responsibility for the consequences,
it is not with the uncomfortable consequences of Freedom with which the
argument for Freedom should begin. To
do so gives a traditionally civilized person the impression that he is dealing
with a wide-eyed crazy person.
Atheists who protest
Prayer Breakfasts by local government bodies are a little more difficult to
analyze. In the realm of politics (“a civilized substitute for war”), “giving offense”
may be necessary and appropriate. We all oppose the creation of a Caliphate or
any Theocracy that will dictate our personal, social, and civil lives (assuming
the Religion being established by the State is not our own). Traditional
Americans, who love the First Amendment (Freedom of Religion), support a
general separation of Church and State even when the Religion being “separated”
from the State is their own. We must separate out two approaches to the problem
of separation of church and state. The first approach is persuasion. Changing
the hearts and minds of the individuals who attend a Prayer Breakfast will not
be accomplished by protests. On the other hand, stopping them from attending (without
persuading them that as a government official their behavior might be
inconsistent with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) can be accomplished by political force. Political
force can be mobilized by protests. In this essay we are not interested in
force. We are talking about changing hearts and minds. Force as a technique is illegitimate
for our purposes. We are seeking to change hearts and minds by use of reason.
So our first rule is: Do
not offend other peoples’ elephants. Avoid this at all costs.
Our friend tells the
story of how he changed from being a Liberal to a Libertarian. In college, our
friend was a committed Socialist. After college, our friend got a job with a
person who was a Libertarian. Over time, by example and conversation, our
friend’s conversion from Liberal to Libertarian was completed. It is a banality
that many people in college are communists or socialists and that after they
get out into the real world and get a job they become more conservative or
libertarian. Of course, this outcome is not true for everyone.
We know of our friend’s
conversion in only the broadest of outlines, but some behavioral guidelines
emerge from the outline.
The change occurred
from the outside. Our friend had a new boss. Every employee cares about her
boss, at least as the provider of the employee’s livelihood with whom good
relations must be maintained or perhaps even as a friend. We have examples of
this from speeches within our Fellowship of Reason®. One of our beloved members
is a healthcare professional and she is intimately familiar with the problems
that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) “ObamaCare” was designed to solve. She has
given three very well received Oratories on healthcare matters. The talks were carefully
researched, well delivered, and fact based. The views among our members about Obamacare
are varied. Given confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret, to seek out or
to retain information supporting one’s view), some of us might not have “heard”
the information communicated in the absence of our love for the speaker.
Our second rule: Establish
good relations with our correspondents.
Wicked,
the Broadway musical that premiered in 2003, presents a radically different
perspective on the moral landscape of the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. Familiarity with the
1939 movie is essential to an appreciation of the musical. For those who know
the 1939 film, we cannot imagine that Glinda, the Good Witch, is anything other
than perfectly good. We cannot imagine that the Wicked Witch of the West (Elphaba
in the musical, named after Oz
originator/author L. Frank Baum) is anything other than perfectly evil. In two
and a half magical hours, the musical Wicked,
completely changes our classical view. Wicked
is an emotional masterpiece.
As an aside, thorough
exegeses of Wicked would reveal
exploitation of all of Professor Haidt’s moral modules. A few examples follow:
care/harm (Elphaba is a disabled child with repulsive green skin); fairness/cheating (the Munchkin Boq pretends to love Elphaba in order to please
his true love; Galinda, later Glinda); loyalty/betrayal (Glinda and Elphaba
are loyal to one another; Fiyero is faithful to Elphaba); sanctity/degradation (friendship/goodness
is/are sacred); authority/subversion (there is regime change from the reign of
Oz to reign of Glinda); and, liberty/oppression (The Wizard of Oz is an abusive
dictator).
Of course, the Oz stories are fantasy and changing
hearts and minds about fiction can only be used as a metaphor for changing
hearts and minds about real-world ideas. But, by analogy, one might conclude
that changing hearts and minds, following the example of Wicked, is accomplished by emotional storytelling, using beautiful
songs, dialog, acting, costumes, and sets.
When persuading, Wicked further instructs by example: we
ought not draw conclusions. Rather, we ought to let the conclusions draw
themselves. Wicked never says that
Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is a sympathetic character and morally
good. Wicked tells a beautiful, emotion-laden
story and the audience is permitted to draw their conclusions. The audience is
unanimous in its conclusion as is shown by the success of the play—over 11
years running, 4,722 Broadway showings, 9 world-wide touring companies, seen by
millions of patrons.
Our third rule: Persuasion
begins with well-told personal, factual stories. Let our correspondents
draw their own conclusions.
Conclusions
Our three rules, drawn
from our knowledge of elephants are these:
Our first rule: Do
not offend other peoples’ elephants. Avoid this at all costs.
Our second rule: Establish
good relations with our correspondents.
Our third rule: Persuasion
begins with well-told, factual stories. Let our correspondents draw their own
conclusions.
The project of
persuasion, thus, can be seen to be a year’s long process of avoiding offending
our correspondents, establishing good relationships with our correspondents,
and sharing fact-based stories with our correspondents.
It is precisely within
a moral community—Fellowship of Reason®—that this years-long project can occur.
