Life Driven Rationality

“Your beliefs become your thoughts.

Your thoughts become your words.

Your words become your actions.

Your actions become your habits.

Your habits become your values.

Your values become your destiny.”

― Gandhi

We are what we are exposed to on a regular basis. The thoughts we practice, the imaginations we carry in our minds regularly, and what we inherently believe to be true at all times. When uncertainty and stress strikes, some of this easy to access ideation quickly converts into behavior, becoming better or worse when we are behaving anonymously in a group, when given a lot of power in times of uncertainty, and also when social norms collapse suddenly. I'm not saying this as a passing opinion. Traditionally, research in social psychology reveals this paradox of good people engaging in bad behaviors repeatedly. Recently, psychological research has found this paradox in non-required goodness as well.

As an instructor of Psychology for nearly ten years in the United States, I got the opportunity to discuss the above questions as part of Social Psychology, a course I thoroughly enjoyed teaching. Whenever I teach this course, I get to tell students how we, as human beings, are capable of surprisingly kind and gruesome behaviors if put in the right conditions. In other words, everything is not commonsensical (e.g., social relationships are good for you.) The science of Social Psychology, marked by an almost breath-and-bias free non-fluttering observant eyes of scientific wonder, enabled and still makes such systematic revelation possible. Entire lines of findings corroborating the above exists in psychology.

(For contrasting examples, see Milgram's studies, Paul Zak's work, and this news story of kindness in which mobilizing timely behavior is central, not physical or mental strength.)

Dr. Stanley Milgram's objective yet mildly disappointed look toward human behavior crosses my mind whenever I am surprised similarly. It was as if he was surprised and not that surprised at the same time whenever human beings weren't being as rational and compassionate as one would expect in particular situations. Just to give a snapshot, Dr. Stanley Milgram was a well-known social psychologist whose work was influenced by his questions about the dark side of human nature, partly due to his own interest and knowledge about the Holocaust of the 1940s. The thorny question that kept him going with his research endeavour was, 'Why do otherwise good caring human beings sometimes become capable of terrible expressions of aggression toward other human beings?' This wasn't some idealistic Utopian thinker asking for eternal world peace. This was a logical constant question that may cross the minds of many people even today. He was basically interested in the socially dilemmatic conditions, which, may make most people, including you and me, act in atrocious violent ways. An economist in the 1960s would have simply called such difficult to understand harmful people, crazy outliers or people under the spell of some temporary mental illness. Not Stanley Milgram. He, along with a few other social psychologists at the time, even then, knew how the behavior was completely rational in the moment. However, not in the way we think of rationality in general, the type in which we aspire for absolute ultimate righteousness, sharp accuracy, based on logical easy to describe reasoning intended keep us correct in all scenarios, at all times and conditions.

In the darkness of these thoughts, I was inspired to bind together ideas expressed in recent decades by Dr. Frans de Waal's Good Natured (de Waal, 1996), Dr. Dacher Keltner's Born to be Good (Keltner, 2009), and Dr. Steven Pinker in his book Rationality (Pinker, 2021). The common thread shared by all three books is how, we as a species, are capable of morally motivated kindness and also jarring aggression, if put in the right socially or life-and-death dilemmatic conditions, in which, we end up choosing life over death at all times. At least that's the consistency I have noticed.

The only thing that changes is how we think of 'life' at the time and in our daily practice.

In Good Natured this is apparent in the following of caregiving yet structured social hierarchies in which orphans are not left alone, and socially agile non-human primate females choose mates even for their young male family members to ensure the group's survival. In Born to be Good, this is found in the unexplained kindness extended to protect even a stranger, or anyone with Mammalian features, making many creatures seem worthy of our help. In Rationality, the same is seen in the distinction between daily rationality and more domain specific or scientific rationality. When sought in expected behavior, a lot of the above, however, is still labeled as mildly unusual, or 'less intelligent' or risky behavior. Why? In stark contrast stands the other strongly evolved tendency of self-preservation, in which the strong generally wants to grab the weak in an omnipresent game of 'Catch me if you can or someone else will catch you, and then whoever survives gets to reproduce again.'

When reconciling the two life tendencies, the phenomenon may be best termed as adaptive rationality, designed and expressed in favor of survival, evolutionarily speaking, not to get eternal factual accuracy of any kind, focused only on the bests and firsts of all possibilities.

Human beings aren't necessarily good or bad, angelic or evil. Human beings have just been good at staying alive for a long time, using whatever information was available to them in times of crisis, peace maintenance, relationship building, uncertainty, or problem solving.

The idea was never to be super intelligent and flawlessly precise. Human beings have loved and hated inaccurately throughout their evolution only to see another day, in which we gain some, we lose some. By the time we realize the morality of it all, (a sensibility slightly secondary to physical survival from the get-go) another full generation of life-minded adults is already standing before us, systematically saved, deliberately vigilant and hesitant at the same time, and ready to make their own mistakes, and occasionally, some acts of kindness.

The quote by Gandhi I began with answers some of these questions, if sought in a few words. Our daily thoughts about what saving life means to us, in a span of space and time, will show up in our actions. When we surprise ourselves, we know what we internalized.

Life may mean the betterment of your own group, life may also mean betterment of the greater good, life may mean choosing yourself over someone else, and life may also mean choosing someone else over yourself.

References

de Waal, F. (1996). Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Harvard University Press.

Keltner, D. (2009). Born to be good: The science of a meaningful life. W. W. Norton & Company.

Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality: What Is it, why it seems scarce, why it matters. Viking Press.