Were friggin humans, and we inherently suck.

FWIW, continuing to behave this way will cause "us" to self-destruct. So one way or another, in 500 years (an eyeblink, really) this question will be resolved.

One of the components that I've seen put forward is that we are still trying to use social paradigms that don't scale up well. This hypothesis says that humans are capable of seriously empathizing with and getting to know and caring about the interests of a limited number of people, this number varying but not to exceed several thousand. I hope that that's not true, but the consequences if it is could have some explanatory power. In a world that's creeping towards monoculture, it seems to be an even more depressing thought - it's bad enough that millions of us Americans care deeply about vapid manufactured fictional people such as Britney Spears and Bill O'Reilly, it would be worse still for the whole world to obsess over them (or Argentinian soap stars or Bollywood singers or quaintly-accented morris dancers, for that matter).

On top of that, I'm led to understand that neurologically, individuals are pretty much incapable of judging hurts to other humans by the same scale as hurts to themselves. Tied together with the Fundamental Error of Attribution (one of my favorite psychological factoids), that too has explanatory power.

You know the Chomsky view, better than I do, but it doesn't really address human nature so let's leave it out for the moment.

Bruce Schneier would say that part of this is that we're bad at judging the risk states we've created. The modern world that we humans have created is one that we're very poorly adapted to in some ways, and in other ways deliberately subverts our ability to gauge risk.

All of these are parts of it, I think. I sadly am not the person with the brainpower to go into detail about all of those, but what encourages me is the notion that human nature is not an immutable thing at all and that we can change, especially when threatened with extinction. Of course, I got that idea from Jared Diamond's Collapse, which also has some very cheerful examples of cultures shooting themselves in the foot, then after judicious and democratic consideration, shooting their other foot as well.

i think it's cuz we're driven by our routines.

What's wrong with me? Please, I care about my daughter's school (do you know the annual costs of a private school on the Upper West side these day?), I recycle, I give to United Way, and just last week I put a dollar bill into the disgustingly filthy hand of a homeless person on the Subway.
What do you want from ME, ME, ME?
And, I am as passionately for world peace and our common humanity as I was during my idealistic undergraduate years at the Wharton School.
And, by the way, why aren't you living with those Cambodian peasants if you love them that much?

It's a great question. Some days I agree with Josh, the first poster, that we suck because we're human.

Today I feel a little differently.

I while ago I read a comment by the retired blogger Billmon that touches on this. It was in response to the plaintive cry of "Why do so many people (Americans) support torture?" made by a poster at Moon of Alabama. His answer was something along the lines of "The answer to your question lies in a better understanding of the Marquis de Sade and the work of Pierre Janet".

Most people know the first name. I'm not a medical professional, though I've been around a few. I was surprised to see that Billmon was suggesting that the ideas of the little known french pyschologist Janet could help us understand how people could behave this way.

Briefly, Janet developed a theory about how people respond to being chronically traumatized. How their personalities are torn apart and then reformed to move beyond the event without ever acknowledging it. (If you've ever driven safely to your destination without remembering much at all of the trip, you've got a very basic non-traumatic version of what I'm talking about. The difference being, once you get where you're going, with a little effort you can recall the particulars of the trip. Precisely because it didn't scare the shit out of you. Anyway, it gets complicated, read the links for more.)

At this point Janet is ancient history, but his ideas are part of a comprehensive model of treatment, outlined in the links below. They aren't easy to read. Especially if, like me, you're not a clinician.

http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/nijenhuis-2004.php

http://psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/58/9/1232

(Trauma is a loaded word and I'm using it in a broad, clinical sense.)

If I had a clever segue to send you back to a happy place, I'd include it here. I've got nothing.

I heard that story too on NPR - very sad and very shaming.

Donescobar - I want you to go to Cambodia and see what is going on and then figure out what you can do about it, without playing a martyr role. Remember - you are the fortunate, not the victim.

And, if your daughter is in a private school, pull her out and put her in the local public school.

I heard that story too on NPR - very sad and very shaming.

Donescobar - I want you to go to Cambodia and see what is going on and then figure out what you can do about it, without playing a martyr role. Remember - you are the fortunate, not the victim.

And, if your daughter is in a private school, pull her out and put her in the local public school.

sorry about the double post - glad I didn't keep pushing the POST button!

My first attempt at posting this vanished. Here's the second.

A while ago, I read a comment by the retired blogger Billmon that hints at an answer. It was in response to the plaintive cry of "Why do so many people (Americans) support torture?" made by a poster at Moon of Alabama. His answer was something along the lines of "The answer to your question lies in a better understanding of the Marquis de Sade and the work of Pierre Janet".

Most people know the first name. I'm not a medical profession, but have been around enough of them to have heard of Janet. So when Billmon suggested him, I had the feeling that I was in on the joke. Or at least spoke enough of the language to understand what was being said.

Briefly, Janet was the first to propose what happens to people who are chronically traumatized (trauma is a loaded word, I'm using it in a clinical sense.) He described how the personality shatters and comes back together after a traumatic event.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Janet

Enough with my attempts at explaining complex phenomena. Read the links below for a thorough explanation. Although I will say that if you've ever driven somewhere and arrived safely at your destination without remembering much if anything of the trip, you are familiar with one of the dissociative states that Janet uncovered. I'd add that it's not one caused by trauma, just that it points out how the brain can operate in different ways.

My point, after a rambling introduction, is that people have been conditioned to function "normally" in spite of their clinically defined traumas. The only way to change this is hard, time consuming, and expensive. Meaning it's not likely to happen on a large enough scale any time soon.

If anyone is interested, this is a link to a paper that is based on the work of Janet and others. It's not an easy read. Especially if, like me, you're not a clinician.

http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/nijenhuis-2004.php

http://psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/58/9/1232

The Cambodians should have had a chat with the Brits, who sent a similar delegation, in the form of John Maynard Keynes, to Washington following WWII to ask for a grant from the US to help rebuild Britain. It seemed a reasonable request, given that the UK had basically held off Nazi Germany for two years, exhausting herself and the Empire while Americans like Henry Ford, Prescott Bush, and Charles Lindbergh sat around hoping that the Germans would bring a little order to Europe, while others plotted to mount a military coup against FDR.

After initially telling the Brits to fuck off, the US relented and granted them a loan, with interest, which was paid off just last year, I believe. All part of that special relationship.

So, there's people, and then there's Americans.

smacfari

You write: "It's not that people don't care.It's that they don't know enough to care."

Is it? The old German defense ("I didn't know then what happened with the Jews. I thought they all went to America." Yeah.)

Americans knew we were dropping shitloads of bombs on Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians--remember the photos--but a) I have enough on my plate caring about those close to me and like me; b) what can I do, in any case?

Tribalism limits empathy. "Looking out for #1" was the national bestseller ushering in the age of narcissim, and the pop pychologists reinforce the hunger for elf-esteem, recognition and collective back-slapping.

Most Americans choose not to live (in their minds) in a larger world. We have become a nation of Seinfelds, whether in an apartment on the Upper West Side or one in a suburb of St. Louis. We have made Stalin's cynicism our own: "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."

Lindsay Lohan, si, 110,000 Iraqis, no.

Hi J:
I can help identify the problem, but each is left to his own solution. See, the fact is that each and every human has the potential to commit evil. And we, each of us, suffer from a very simple hydra-headed, twin tower of motives.
EACH of us!
That twin tower we EACH feel & experience is:
1. LAZINESS ~ we EACH, universally, to an individual degree, are slothful ~ re: our time & energies. Hence we are found in default on our productivity (by which we need survive &, some, even flourish ~ & do so honestly, by producing net value.)
Default on that, & what does one do?
Become a street person, or a politician, or a preacher, or some other criminal mind, (disguised or otherwise), seeking easy "gain" to suit our laziness.
2. ENVY ~ we EACH, (universally, to each individual’s degree), want what the "successful" around us have. Materially, we will usurp (with seared conscience) that which our parents, our peers, our "gov't," & our [de]volved, dumbed down societal norms exemplify & allow. ENVY not only takes what others have, it must also hurt the ones that we usurp it from, as their potential to resurface once again with continued perpetual success makes us have to face the low self-esteem pain that happens when we consciously realize we do not live as equals. ENVY kills, literally, ... as the supremely suckered Cambodians have experienced. But they will recover as productive people. Worse though, ENVY also kills the perpetrator, who cannot recover as s/he has not the depth of resources upon which to draw. To wit: note the corrupt current day empirical USA, which needs at minimum (as a start), Ron Paul's Constitutional , ir3volution to mitigate its devastation of Earth’s inhabitants, both foreign & domestic.
Deal with this as an individual, & U will have dealt with each human's 2 fundamental problems, insofar as U are individually afflicted.
"Who is the value producer? Who is the value destroyer? U know which U are! Let the battle begin!" ~ paraphrased from N-T.
~ Whade in Canada.

Whether YOU don't know how or just DON'T want to ---If YOU can't LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF, well then, YOU will have these problems.

HAVE THE CAMBODIANS ever been AMERICA'S neighbor? Ask the U.S. ARMY RANGERS, they are BLOOD BROTHERS.

I was going to post something long(ish) and (kinda)thoughtful, then I read the comments above, some of which-- I guess-- are bitterly sarcastic, or kind of strange. (Not the guy talking about M. Janet.)

I don't think Americans are irredeemably brutish or savage, even though we do a hell of a lot of projecting, which I'm guessing has to do with collective guilt, because underneath it all we know just how savage are history has been.

But then I look at the mellow, super-amenable Scandanavians, with their enlightened welfare states and funky furniture and saccharine(but catchy) pop music, and I think how they were pretty savage, some 1,000-1,200 years ago.

You'd think the social sciences could teach us how to accelerate the process.

smacfarl

OK, but no pass for the elites, who know more and care (or choose) to think and do less. If you can find it, read an old W.H. Auden poem on the Swarthmore faculty, the opening of which is "They're nice..."
To view (almost) everything from a (vanishing) point of the self may not be a "choice" for all, but since so many in our society have bought into it--from Oprah-watching housewives to Ivy undergraduates, that is to me as depressing as it is defining.

Just last night I was reading one of the parables - "The Woman at the Well." Not the one with Jesus in it - the Buddhist one. It was a slightly edited version of the following, from Paul Carus's 1915 book The Gospel of Buddha.

ANANDA, the favorite disciple of the Buddha, having been sent by the Lord on a mission, passed by a well near a village, and seeing Pakati, a girl of the Matanga caste, he asked her for water to drink. Pakati said: "O Brahman, I am too humble and mean to give thee water to drink, do not ask any service of me lest thy holiness be contaminated, for I am of low caste." And Ananda replied: "I ask not for caste but for water"; and the Matanga girl's heart leaped joyfully and she gave Ananda to drink.

Ananda thanked her and went away; but she followed him at a distance. Having heard that Ananda was a disciple of Gotama Sakyamuni, the girl repaired to the Blessed One and cried: "O Lord help me, and let me live in the place where Ananda thy disciple dwells, so that I may see him and minister unto him, for I love Ananda." The Blessed One understood the emotions of her heart and he said: "Pakati, thy heart is full of love, but thou understandest not thine own sentiments. It is not Ananda that thou lovest, but his kindness. Accept, then, the kindness thou hast seen him practice unto thee, and in the humility of thy station practice it unto others. Verily there is great merit in the generosity of a king when he is kind to a slave; but there is a greater merit in the slave when he ignores the wrongs which he suffers and cherishes kindness and good-will to all mankind. He will cease to hate his oppressors, and even when powerless to resist their usurpation will with compassion pity their arrogance and supercilious demeanor.

"Blessed art thou, Pakati, for though thou art a Matanga thou wilt be a model for noblemen and noble women. Thou art of low caste, but Brahmans may learn a lesson from thee. Swerve not from the path of justice and righteousness and thou wilt outshine the royal glory of queens on the throne."

My conclusion - the claim of the Buddha is that what is wrong with us is that we have not been effectively educated about our own affective life. The confusion we have about what is going on within us leads us to do things like fall in love with kind monks, or stab our unfaithful lover down by the river, or throw our four children into the river, ... and I'm sure you can scale it up from there.

It would seem that instituting worldwide effective affective education may be a rather long-term project - but if we don't start in that general direction, we might not get there.

May the Creative Forces of the Universe Stand Beside Us, and Guide Us, through the Night with the Light from Above, in a metaphorical sense.

I'm greedy, selfish, and view others outside of my monkeysphere as abstracted and single dimensional.

That's my excuse for what's wrong with us, because people don't seem to be too different in general.

I've never really wondered, "How could the German people just stand by and watch that happen?", not only the holocaust, but the whole orgy of death, particularly through eastern Europe and Russia.

They could do it like we could do it. Onlookers routinely underestimate us; they assigned qualities like civility, literature, culture, education to the Germans -- it couldn't possibly produce what happened in violence or the apathy to it, but I think it could precisely because of it, and still does in our case. These are elements that strengthen nationalism, and call for the annihilation of those that compete with us for resources. They don't deserve them. We do. Congressmen didn't get elected by the Cambodians; that's not why they have power, so they have no interest in listening to them.

Just wait for the great catastrophe. Sure, we'll feel bad, but lebensraum is necessary (i.e. Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and maybe even Russia).

donecobar,

Of course most of the elites are in the mind set that yeilds the fourth result, which is why Jonathan excluded them from the lament. Hence my disagreement with his lament.

So, did the Cambodians get the deal?

So we DID win the war! Alright!

Wait, what the heck? Why is this about "us"? This is exactly about the elites of this country - they're the one who turned down Cambodians, not us. The rest of us can't do shit. ("I can barely hold my fudge.") The Cambodians never came to me and said, "Look, help us out." If they had, and I could, I probably would have. But they didn't, and I can't. So why am I being asked this question, again?

No, the world CAN get rid of the USA and we WOULD have a better future, not due to you being distinctly bad people, but because the PARADIGM you exist in will evaporate for a while. The enemy is the PARADIGM, not the government, not the people, but the PARADIGM. If the Paradigm dictates that exploitation of the small and weak is essential for the survival of the great and powerful, who can then somehow keep the small and weak too stupid and poor and drugged to know how badly they've been run over, then that is what will happen, that is what will be rationalized.

Rise Wretched of the Earth, I implore thee, and rid the paradigm.

Simple, we love pain and we're numb from it all at the same time. We've experienced so much pain that we've come to rely on it for comfort and a sense of security. Pain is home base for us. Without it we're lost. Pain is the opiate of all people. Our love of pain is why some many of us recoil at those who complain about it. The complainers threaten our source of self-justification and belonging. Pain absolves us from the guilt of our pleasures, it gives us standing in the community, and it provides the basis of our self-respect. The Cambodians should thank us for all the pain we provided as we should thank them for the same.

Monkeysphere.

Re monkeysphere - see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

(grooming mistah charley appreciatively)

All this talk is bullshit of the purest ray serene. If the Cambodians looked like us and talked like us, we'd be more sympathetic. Hmm...but wait a minute, didn't we carpet bomb Desden during WW II--women, children, dogs, and cats? Oh, but they DIDN'T talk like us, did they? Whew!

All this is bullshit of the purest ray serene. If the Cambodians looked like us and talked like us, we'd be more sympathetic. Hmm...but wait a minute, didn't we carpet bomb Desden during WW II--women, children, dogs, and cats? Oh, but they DIDN'T talk like us, did they? Whew!

yeah and that fits in with what that dunbar's number article talks about...

Group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion.… Dunbar … proposes furthermore that language may have arisen as a "cheap" means of social grooming, allowing early humans to efficiently maintain social cohesion. Without language, Dunbar speculates, humans would have to expend nearly half their time on social grooming, which would have made productive, cooperative effort nearly impossible. Language may have allowed societies to remain cohesive, while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy.

so what if i say, rules help solve large-scale problems, but language differences undermine fair rule application.

If the staggering, berserk cruelty we've displayed were due to our being especially bad people, the world could get rid of us and see a brighter tomorrow. But as tempting as that appears to some (including, on certain days, me) it wouldn't work.

Um, why not?

Seriously. If you were gone, there are a lot of people who would be better off, depending upon the nature of your passing. Hell, if certain sections of our population were gone "we'd" be better off.

Your problem is the term "we," perhaps. A black citizen of the U.S. has a different spin on "we." A chincese citizen probably does, too. As one goes closer to the pinnacle of power in our society -- which also happens to be the pinnacle of power for Earth, a very salient point -- that "we" becomes less and less troubling and soon becomes a "you" -- hell, yeah, "you" can feel free to leave.

The problem isn't just the people, it's the infrastructure combined with the power. We have a system that, to be slightly dramatic, rewards evil and punishes good. Bush cheats and wins, Gore plays fair and loses. Clintons and Gore lie and cheat, NAFTA passes. And so on. And -- this is important -- the majority in the U.S. is pretty much complacent unless things are going Terribly Wrong for them.

Human beings are awful, wretched creatures on a good day, and human beings with power are the worst. Still, some individuals, and some remarkable groups, can transcend that nature and do right on a marvelous scale.

The majority in this country has failed to do so. Why are you shocked? Ah, because you count yourself as part of the same group.

Has it occured to anyone that that shock -- the emotional impulse that "our kind of people couldn't have done this" -- is part of the reason why a human population can abide, or support, tremendous moral wrongs? That impulse is an absurdity. Remember what Voltaire said about those.

Dunbar apparently has no knowledge of actual linguistics; I've been assured by linguists that modern theories of linguistics imply that language was preceded by symbolic representation, and that syntax came first - that is, language is about thinking, not about the social, communicative stuff.

Good, good questions. The truth of the Law of the
Strong has always been known - Homer expressed
it in the Iliad and it has always been a subject for epics. As long as Christianity existed in the West it could provide some kind of moral framework - even though it was often violated and perverted. Now even that fragile safeguard
has been dismantled and we are left with the knowledge of the horror - how fragile are man's moral and cultural constraints! And there is nothing in the modern world or in the thoughts of modern thinkers to even acknowledge or appreciate those constraints. The past, culture, honor, Christianity, religion, international law... modern man seems only to know how to sneer. Modernity has now evolved into an experiment to re-bestializize mankind. We must all look at what is going on with open eyes and knowing minds.

'And there is nothing in the modern world or in the thoughts of modern thinkers... etc etc
Nothing? Did you ever read the plays of the German expressionists? Were they ever aware of how "fragile man's moral and cultural restraints" are.
Modernism did not "re-bestialize" much of anything. The beast is always there. It just seems asleep between bloody breaks out of its cage.

modern man seems only to know how to sneer.

because more people are called "men" now than were ever dreamt of in your philosophy. peasants are wicked wicked wicked.

It's interesting that things _seem_ to improve over historical time. This could be partly observer's bias. On one hand, the old Salem witch trials, on the other, the Holocaust was recent. Slavery appears to be gone, but then the labor violence of the early 1900s may suggest, well, a continual evolution. So, are things improving? If so, does this reflect... technological change? Genetics? Cultural/political or /religious change? (After the analysis, figure out how to bootstrap the process!)

No One of Consequence got it pretty right with- "The problem isn't just the people, it's the infrastructure combined with the power. We have a system that, to be slightly dramatic, rewards evil and punishes good."

We have a society which is based on exploitation (class/competition), coercion (monetorised economy) and violence (from child rearing to legal/prison system). So this is what you get.

Read some Alice Miller for copious insights.

There is little compassion in our society (it's beated out of us one way or another). This sets up deep seated anxiety and fear. To function with that we need substitutes such as drugs. Other substitutes are invariably also addictive. One substitute of enormous proportions is power (over others). It is extemely addictive and carries with it the same pathology of any other substance addiction. Priorities are upended. Everything must feed the addiction. If it does't, it is discarded as unimportant. It is the same maddness as any other addition. In short, we are governed by (mostly) men who are a somewhat madder than we are.

We accept this type of organised society as at least inevitable if not genetically imposed. Both are wrong, of course.
Read Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" for some stimulating reading on this subject.

Beam me up, Scotty ..... now.