BlinkThink/NYT

A quick update on our first posting. David Brooks had a good little synopsis in the NYT last week of the link between morality, evolution, and the kind of 'snap judgement' that Malcolm Gladwell documented in Blink (and which I denounced). He argues that 'moral' behaviour -- cooperation, altruism, selflessness -- are hard-wired because evolutionary pressures makes them advantageous over the long run. That competitive individualism is not the only 'natural' urge is not news -- Marx noted this in response to the rip-off artists who wanted Darwin to be the mouthpiece for social privelege, and anyone who's been on a movie set knows that life as we know it halts without a division of labour -- but the insight here is that over time, our brains have moved this understanding deep down into our involuntary reactions, so morality is more like an instantaneous aesthetic judgement than a chain of logical inference. BlinkThink is not so bad after all, according to this way of looking at it.

Interesting, but we still need to respect the findings of the Rwanda genocide study first noted in this blog on January 21, 2009.