The brain-scientist and philosopher Patricia Churchland is giving some lectures on a specific and partial answer to the question: What can neuroscience tell us about morality? A short news article about these lectures can be found here.
Her main point according to the article is hardly a surprise to those who’ve been keeping up at all with developments in the brain sciences. Oxytocin, which I’ve seen referred to as the ‘maternal hormone’ and vasopresin increase sociability and apparently do this by decreasing fear levels and increasing trust levels. This reminds me of something I read in a book about human personality, perhaps in one of Jerome Kagan’s books. Research psychologists tune up tests which look for links between brain-states and hormone levels by using dogs from certain breeds. There is a certain scale where dogs, not surprisingly, used as guards — such as German Shepherds — are the most fearful especially about things or living creatures which enter their ‘personal space’ to speak roughly. Fear leads to aggressiveness, at least in animals with the physical capabilities of effective attack. At the other end of the scale, they use hunting dogs, especially retrievers which have been bred to be fearless and highly sociable. Retrievers have been bred to be fearless so that they’ll go charging into brush or jump into waters they don’t know. They’ve been bred to be sociable for a variety of reasons including the fact that hunting expeditions often involve sharing a blind or quarters with dogs and human beings they’ve not met or not seen for a year. It might well be that the same physical state, genetic or otherwise, creates the fearlessness and the sociability.
The point about this use of breeds of dogs to tune up those studies is that a Golden Retriever is full of so much of some happy-juice or fearlessness-juice that he often acts as if stupid — though a member of one of the very smartest of breeds. A Golden I once owned would repeatedly go right up to dogs which had attacked him and try to make friends and he could repulse the other dog only because he was so big and strong for a Golden. It seemed to take about ten attacks or so before he’d counter-attack. On the other hand, dogs from one of the ‘guard’ breeds could turn out to be nasty towards most creatures even when raised as pets in loving families. I don’t believe genes are the only key to this because it apparently takes only about seven generations of deliberate selection to produce a pet-like family line from wild canines of various sorts. How many more to produce a Golden Retriever or other peaceful and fearless line? I don’t know but they only started breeding retrievers as helpers in ‘gun’ hunting about the middle of the 19th century and it didn’t take long in evolutionary terms. There’s more going on here, maybe the mother’s body activating particular possibilities in the puppies and maybe other factors not yet discovered. Yet, those other factors could be labeled as ‘somatic’, transmissible at least for some number of generations. That’s still flesh-and-blood.
It’s no different with human beings. Our race has many behavioral tendencies, some of which will contribute to peacefulness and others to aggression and still others to mostly unrelated character traits. Not all of these tendencies are found in all family lines to the same extent — a very complex issue. I know families where the members are generally much more pleasant and gentle than most human beings. I also know families whose members tend to be aggressive, sometimes to good and moral purposes and sometimes just to satisfy their own desires.
Sons do tend to be like their fathers, though I’ve read of dog-breeders claiming they tend even more strongly to be like their maternal grand-sires.
A fascinating line of research and, for now, we can only wonder if we have even identified many of the important questions or if we’re set to be as surprised as Darwin himself was by the rapid emergence of those complex behaviors in hunting dogs which we could call gun instincts, that is, the tendency of even my pet Golden to move forward and start a weaving, searching movement when he heard guns fired nearby. He was afraid of some loud sounds, but he would show no fear when honor guards fired during parades or various ceremonies. That wasn’t because of any experiences with me — I don’t hunt and I’ve fired guns a few times in my life and only at firing ranges.
A sociable and largely fearless creature can, of course, fear potential predators greatly, and other events or things. Even fearless dogs are said to have some strong instinctive fear of bears. I’ve read that in the days when dogs were used to distract, perhaps more accurately — torment, bears while the hunter is getting there and setting up for a shot, they had to undergo very demanding testing to make them follow a bear’s track. They, naturally enough, will be inclined to go the other way when they know a bear’s around.
It’s quite interesting that fearlessness, and trust, seem to be the foundations of sociability though a well-ordered human community will also contain a number of fearful men and women. There’s a certain quality of fear which leads to violent reaction, on the part of a Rottweiler — bred for guard duty — or on the part of a soldier who’s forced to live under constant fear for his own life or fear for the lives of the others in his unit.
“Be not afraid,” as Pope John Paul II said often. Trust in God and be not afraid. Trust in your fellow-men, at least those in your family or other flesh-and-blood communities, and be not afraid. You will be disappointed in your fellow-men often, even parents or children or dearest friends, but get over it as my Golden often got over an attack the previous day by another dog. You will also be disappointed in God but you can only trust that He is taking care of your long-term interests however poorly He seems to reward those who take up His cause in this life. Sometimes, God even seems to punish with special severity those who serve Him in a dedicated way.
Be not afraid. Easy enough to say, but hard to do — unless your body produces large amounts of certain hormones. An interesting and disturbing problem for a Christian who wants to believe each man and woman and child can be saved if only each of those individuals turns to God. I think that’s true in the end, but there’s a better way to express the difficulty of this matter:
How could a man of violent and distrustful tendencies, a man of inadequate oxytocin flows in this life and inadequate perfected oxytocin flows in the next life, be happy in Heaven?
Wouldn’t Heaven be hell for such a man? Is God then to change each man so he can be happy in Heaven? Would he then be the same man? Or would God have destroyed Hercules and have created a gentle Francis to take his place in Heaven?
I’ve maintained that we’re embodied creatures. We modern men are coming to understand the complexity of relationships between many aspects of human nature, including between hormonal flows or brain events and personality traits. We’re made peaceful by the presence of proper flows of oxytocin, to simplify more than a bit.
The question returns: What does this mean? We don’t yet know, but we should courageously and faithfully respond to God’s Creation, seeking to understand what the Almighty has done in His acts as Creator — even when it leads to difficult questions. I might say we need good flows of oxytocin to have so good a level of trust and courage.
As Pope Benedict XVI said during a speech on 2008/06/07, “Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.” I don’t think he meant more exact in terms of hair-splitting arguments about human nature in terms of the science and philosophy of the Middle Ages or ancient Greece.
If the virtues of man are tied to man’s physical nature, then we should understand man in the best available way, build our moral philosophies and moral theologies according. We shouldn’t give up on those who seem to be missing ‘virtue-genes’, whatever that might mean, but we should learn to respond to the part of God’s Creation which is the individual human being. We should learn to teach young men of violent tendencies to control themselves — and that’s unlikely to be done by forcing them to sit in classrooms as if they were a different sort of young man. In fact, it might well be that some young men become violent because they’re forced to sit in those classrooms at a time when they have urges to be moving about, hunting and fishing and exploring the wilderness or maybe working with horses and cattle. It’s frightening that the schools seem to be controlled by some who don’t even understand any human diversity beyond a liking for different television shows.
Our modern tolerance is a strange sort of attitude which really sees others as being “as good as us” only because we know they are potentially just like us in all ways. We’ll do our darnedest to help them to achieve that noble goal of being just like us.
I was a student who was more interested in learning than in doing well in classroom situations. In my early 30s, I was classified as someone unsuited for life in modern corporations by a psychologist working for a management placement firm — a seemingly good man who wished he could have at least offered me some good advice and had none to give. Like those young men who can’t stay quiet in classrooms, I have also spent much of my life at the business end of that modern tolerance. It isn’t pleasant. Though it might concern other physical attributes than oxytocin production, I figure that what I am is built deep into my being because even during those years of my late teens and twenties when I wished to be like those corporate widgets who seemed so happy, I couldn’t do it.
I’ll say no more along those lines. Scientists, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and Paris Island drill sergeants all have worthwhile viewpoints outside of the scope of the work of each other. There are things I’ll be able to better say as a novelist than I can say as a philosopher or theologian, things I’ll say better than brain-scientists or anthropologists or even drill sergeants.
[I didn’t throw in Paris Island drill sergeants as a matter of whim. In Where Resident Aliens Live, a book written by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon about the difficulties of retaining Christian faith as an undergraduate in an American college, they reprinted an article from the Wall Street Journal in which some of those sergeants spoke of a radical loss of moral structure in the young men coming to be trained as marines. They had seen this change happen all at once, circa 1990, and didn’t differentiate between young men from different ethnic groups or those from unstable versus solid families. Interesting and strange and frightening.]