Reading into memories of the origins of virtue: Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue (London: Viking, 1997)
The Origins of Virtue came out 25 years ago when I was 32, and I have a dim memory of it. Dim and thin, compared to a memorable reading I had of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, which I borrowed from the State Library of Tasmania’s Hobart shelves. I can visualise where it was on the shelf, on a bay near the end, one back from the corner over the intersection. The memory was of ‘oh, yes, I remember reading that’ on a later visit, or two.
In chapter 11 of The origins of virtue there is a small section debunking a quote attributed to Chief Seattle, which I think I remember, but I am not absolutely sure if this was my first exposure to this revelation.
The reason I am harping on about my bad memory is that I have read a lot of these science essay books, which gather together around a topic wrought-iron facts in ornate displays of erudition within a great deal of scientific hesitations. However the wrestling of the varied angles are often drawn from the same hymn book of consensus. My memory thus blurs them all into the one book. The textmachine of science.
The fact I can example a maybe-memory of the Chief Seattle quote being debunked, is itself a good example of the cheatsense human have, and which Ridley examples in the book as more hardwired in us, than other, more logical, faculties, (about page 130 in Chapter 7, see “organ for social exchange”). Fraud annoys us, even if these lies are urban eco-myths. (Just as Nietzsche says we lack an organ for knowledge, for truth).
The Origins of Virtue opens with the anarchist Kropotkin’s escape story. I definitely do not remember reading this here as I had read so much anarchist literature on Kropotkin and his works, and all that is now an even older blur.
The book then chants through the Hadza, game theory via prisoner dilemmas where sexual selection is the prison governor, various considerations at the individual level on altruism, reciprocity, all these examples as possible instincts/genes active in a marriage market, the cheat-detecting thing again, fairness versus reciprocity, revenge, animals do not hold grudges you-know…
There is a pivot at this point with Robert Frank, Adam Smith, and at about page 141 Jerome Kagan’s call that emotion is the prime mover, not ‘reason’.
And then, for me at about 60 years old, the most interesting part of the book is a paragraph or so where James Q. Wilson gets a mention, and (page 143)
who “ argues that morality is no more a convention than other sentiments such as lust or greed.” (The Moral Sense)
Which is my point so yes I am mentioning those names as I am going to have to chase those references down… (I didn’t really do this sort of thing in the 90s. Ideas were more important than names… —The Red Queen is only in my zotero bibliographic database from 2008. The Origins of Virtue ? The Moral Sense? not at all.)
(((((So, then, but, however… —is this where I got the “idea”? My idea. It pre-dates me getting there, but usually when I am blinded on the road to Damascus I forget all that. Don’t you?)))))
And why then is morality not merely a convention?
“—in order to guarantee commitment”.
This misses an opportunity. It’s a kludge to unite the game theory descriptions from the first half on individualistic interactions, with the second half. I mean I say kludge because I think I have a better idea of the game-play.
The book continues by recapitulating a great chain of being, if oddly, through the expansion of human life into it’s other phases/spaces/landscapes/worlds:
groups not just individuals gaming theory ‘We co-operate in order to compete.’ (Chapter 8) (lek cordination)
and wage war (Chapter 9) and trade (Chapter 10),
religion gets whacked into Chapter 8 with the debunking of eco-religion (Chief Seattle quote mentioned above),
Property and distrust the state (Lobsters, potlatch, Leviathan, New Guinea) Chapter 12,
and we end on trust and where he lives in Newcastle, a city no longer the eye of an industrial empire.
It’s a fairly ordinary liberal Kropotkin-esque set of views because you cannot trust the state (—rather than the views of a harebrained libertarian robber-baron who really wants to be king because you cannot trust the state and the slaves seem to be rebelling so we need a strong leader like… —me.)
As a compromise or pragmatism this and my position in practice are fairly similar. I am probably not that different to Matt Ridley, but I am a bit younger, and I have more chaos in my emergent soul. And I wouldn’t write a book about the chain of being in that order. (Why religion before property? Surely they differentiated and 'co-evolve' from each other in a similar epoche? And why put trust at the end? It is unsatisfying.) The trouble with game theory is that it misses the main game.
The most interesting lines do not occur in that last half, nor in the first half. They appear in the pivot between gamey individuals and groupie feels. Where Ridley must jitter about a bit. I quoted one above, and now another. [After an example of Antonio Damasio’s brain damaged emotionless “rational fools” (p144) who have no short cuts (analysis-paralysis) and no empathic long game (how do they then #realquestion differ from psychopaths?).] We have a nod to social institutions as the outcome of emotional thinking and we get the following line (with my emphasis):
“perhaps we should be arranging them in such a way as to bring out human virtue.”
Now we are talking. That’s more like it!
And, on page 147 we get:
“the virtuous are virtuous so they can find the virtuous in order to build a virtuous world.”
The book should have kicked off from there, that is the origin of the world in which virues appear.
Ridley, Matt.
- The Origins of Virtue (London: Viking, 1997) ISBN 978 0670863570
- The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (London: Viking, 1993)
Wilson, James Q. The Moral Sense. (New York, Free Press, 1993)
Originally posted in May 2023 on substack.com