The making of American morality

I was thinking today as I drove along Arizona Road, from Phoenix to Sacaton, about American morality. My son-in-law, Chris, started me thinking about this, when he said that Americans have forgotten how to be capitalists. By this he meant that we have forgotten that capitalism means providing service, along with a sale, and that if an economic system, be it capitalist or other, is to endure (meaning that business continues to come back because the consumer is satisfied) it doesn't mean caveat emptor. Service clearly is a value and thinking about values got me started thinking about morals.

While our stories today are largely written by young, randy males in Hollywood for young, randy males across the country (and world), and our moral system is in a quandary, it struck me that stories, at one time, were an important foundation of moral systems. It was in stories that we heard about the consequences of actions and had depicted for us the importance of certain actions, which may be tough to do, but are important in the long run. The stories that I think have helped shape our nation include the stories of our presidents, Lincoln returning the money, Washington confessing to cutting down the cherry tree and suffering in battle for his countrymen/women. The stories of racial inequity, Bury my heart at wounded knee and Uncle Tom's Cabin, had a fundamental effect on encouraging racial tolerance.

But, we have dismissed the importance of stories as we have dismissed the importance of so many nurturing behaviors. Darwinian literary theorists, may their tribe not continue to increase, argue that the intellectual construct is what is important about stories. While stories, or at least artsy literary narrative (which bores me to no end right now, as so much of it is so self-indulgent) may build synapses, it seems so clear to me that what is important about stories is the effect they have on behavior. The effect is seen in observable patterns of behavior, in predictability.

A woman's work is never done

Today, after watching Thanksgiving dinner being prepared, I realized how true is the truism: A woman's work is never done. There are several interesting things in regard to a woman's work.

(1) Women work is almost always ritualized, in the sense that the first necessary steps flow into the second necessary steps, and the second into the third, and so on, and everyone seems to work in concert, preparing parts of the meal. Women can, probably don't always, but certainly can, work well together, anticipating their own and the other person's next steps and one another's needs.
(2) While women undoubtedly are thinking about what they are doing, much of what they do seems to be so comfortable for them that they don't seem to concentrate on what they are doing. They can do several things at once, including talk, laugh, tend to children, work on two dishes at a time, etc.

I know, looking back over my memories, that it takes many years of working with others, your mother, grandmothers, aunts, to develop these skills of cooperative endeavor. When I was five, my grandmother had me doing things a five year old could do--fold napkins, polish the silver--and when I got to the age of being able to handle the crystal, I knew that my labors were acceptable in her sight. It was only as I began to enter my teens that I could join in the truly cooperative labor that I had been observing for years. It took almost a decade to develop many of the important skills for preparing one meal.

I could go into much more detail, other than just saying that women's thanksgiving meal preparation activities so often being intergenerationally social and cooperative, but it seems clear to me that the work that men do (and now many women) is often solitary. Men are not to be interrupted when they work and if they are interrupted they are generally not happy campers.

Now, don't get me wrong, I work in research and on a daily basis I have to concentrate and hate having that concentration broken, as "crucial" thoughts get lost in the shuffle. However, I do recognize that in the long run and the big picture, these thoughts that are being strung together in my computerizing mind, are of less importance than the rituals of food, generosity, and child rearing. The point here is that work requiring intense concentration (e.g., painting, Anne; research, Kate, stuff that men in the family are doing) is antisocial. It is at the expense of being social

So, if there is a point here it is that thank god a woman's work is never done. She is holding the world together while others are sunk deep into their thoughts, too many of which have lead to inventions that one has to wonder if we need, or to the world being torn apart in war and strife. So much for creativity.

From killer apes to happy thanksgiving

Darwinian theorists, at least those who think beyond accepted dogma and limited set of data that can acceptably be used to test theories (i.e., surveys done with undergraduate psychology students, cross cultural studies of highly westernized people, and limited amounts of descriptive data drawn from the worst ethnographies of all time), realize that they need to account, at some point, not only for altruism (e.g., the bountiful meal that the Indians fed to the starving and largely ignorant British colonists), particularly if that altruism is not returned in kind (did the British ever return that act of altruism, double fold, to those who fed them? What the theory requires is a quick return, probably among people with regular interactions, that is greater than the original gift), but that they need to account for other human behaviors, including rituals. **

This brings us to the topic of rituals involving gifts, or actually we started with rituals, but I have been trying to get from killer apes to ritualized, bountiful, and generous feeding of the stranger, and this requires meandering a bit through the morass that theory has built around human behavior. Modern Darwinian theorists explain altruism (gifts, generosity?) in several ways. The first is group selection, a theory that is wrong and I will not even bother to discuss it, as some very intelligent people have spent a lot of effort doing so (read their stuff, with skepticism of course). This just means that group x, because it has cooperative folk in it, can beat the pants off group y, because group x can, if nothing else, create killer fighting groups).* The second theory is reciprocal altruism, which can explain some behavior, especially that seen in the modern world (this refers to tit for tat--you give to me, I give to you, as discussed in the first paragraph), and the third is kin selection. In the case of the first thanksgiving, I have dismissed explanation one and two (because the colonists did not quickly and adequately reward their saviors and group selection is wrong), but explanation three, kin selection, obviously does not fit either--unless we go back to the early, early common ancestor of all humans (that killer ape?) these people eating together were not close kin, the co-efficient of relatedness was too low

Further, this limited handful of theories, it seems to me, cannot account for the fact that for several hundred years, that first set of thanksgiving behaviors has been ritualized, handed down, from one generation to the next. Thanksgiving, today, is a family ritual of generosity and sharing. I would argue it was a family ritual the first time it was done, with family defined in that case fictively--metaphorical kin. I argue in my book that a fundamental maternal behavior, which is the foundation of kinship, is generosity and care of the vulnerable. Of course this brings us to the topic of "good" mothers, a topic I will discuss on another day when I want to tweak the militant feminists and their easily aroused ire.

Maternal-child interactions, from very early in human prehistory, were ritualized, involving such things as particular feeding interactions, play activities to keep a child quiet if nothing else. I see as stereotyped behavior. A handshake is a ritual, as is a religious service, which involves a large set of stereotyped behaviors. Predictability in a pretty unpredictable world must have been essential for our ancestors and their survival and reproduction.

However, to end this topic, I must return to that act of generosity and the vulnerable position in which such an act places the generous person. Now, at a time when American Indians are vulnerable and in many cases desperate (unemployment being 50% on many reservations), I see no caravans going out to reservations carrying bountiful amounts of food. When a person is generous, that person uses his/her important resources for the benefit of others, in this case relative strangers. These resources go to promote the survival and reproduction of the stranger. They also put those colonists in a position to reward the generous act, but over and over, generation after generation, quite the opposite has been done.

I am not arguing for nobility of past peoples, so much as I am arguing that we need to focus some of our studies on the altruism seen in traditional peoples. Of course, there will be some quick and slick response (at least in my mind, as no one knows this site exists, except my family and this blog is aimed at explaining my book to them in bits and pieces) on the part of theorists. Without having heard any of the arguments, although they will be predictable, probably drawn from something obscure in history that provides another view of the event (something like a statement saying that the Indians only served the worst looking and lowest in nutrient content foods, and kept the good food for themselves--it is way too tempting to rewrite history, as we often do, to fit our theories, and it begs the question of why serve the stranger anything that was at all edible).

So, happy thanksgiving and think about the fact that you may be here because generations ago someone fed a stranger.

*while it may be true that a cooperative set of individuals, meaning they work together towards an aim, can whip a less cooperative set (who can't get an act together), too many genes were being swapped for group selection to explain this.

**my mother would have hated that sentence as she always said that anything important enough to write should not be lessened by putting it in parentheses.

I was just thinking...

Yesterday, when eating lunch at a restaurant with a friend, I found myself spacing out (that is, becoming introspective), looking around, idly watching people eat. While people were not eating in sync, with all spoons going to all mouths in an orderly fashion, eating clearly is a ritualized behavior, with some personality quirks thrown in for good measure. Everyone used the four utensils provided, kept a napkin more or less on their laps, didn't pour their drinks in their laps, and didn't throw food onto the walls or other diners. Everyone was moving food from their plates into their mouths , but only some seemed to clearly savor the taste. Others seemed to be savoring the social aspects of eating--talking between bites. Of the social eaters, some seemed to nibble between words, while others were shoving amazingly large amounts of food into their mouths. Eating is often a social as opposed to a solitary ritual and when we eat alone we probably forget the correct (read, ritualized) behaviors we learned as a child. Further, when we rebel against childhood influences, we breakdown the social rituals, becoming (dare I say it?) more animal like.

While I acknowledge that it was an invasion of privacy to be watching such an intimate moment of indulging (meaning, providing ample opportunity for that sense to perform) a particular appetite, it did raise the question of why it is socially sanctioned to indulge taste in public (not in the sense of having good taste in terms of the arts, but in terms of food flavors) and not so socially sanctioned to indulge some of our other senses in public. Touch is important, yet when we indulge our sense of touch it is often done in private, as in a massage. In South America, I used to be jealous when I watched people get a ritualized, social head massages to get out the piojos or lice. Touch was seen as socially important and appropriate there. One has to wonder how much our failure to encourage touch (which probably is important to this social species called Homo sapiens) is due to Freud (that is, we see it as sexual) or to our individualism. Swimming and mud wrestling are some of the few public indulgences we allow of having something touch our skin. Suddenly, all of our noisy and quiet eaters were converted in my mind into mud wrestlers, cavorting the mud, flipping up and around, enjoying the sense of touch, texture, and smell. Well, this is long enough, tomorrow more introspections on our senses and how we restrain and indulge them.