This headline jumped out at me today: "Is Do Unto Others Written Into Our Genes?" And I immediately thought: Mencius would say "Yes!"
The article centers on the research of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, especially his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. There is much Mencian in the conversation, even if Mencius gets no mention in the article. Here's how it starts:
Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.
At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?
The Mencian idea of innately good human nature can be consistent with evolution, especially an idea of social evolution in which fulfillment of personal and social duties makes for stronger more resilient, and longer lasting, societies. Of course, Mencius himself bemoaned the fall from morality of his own times. But there is every reason to be optimistic, according to his thinking, about the continuing possibilities of human perfection:
Human
nature is inherently good, just like water flows inherently downhill. There’s no such thing as a person who isn’t
good, just as there’s no water that doesn’t flow downhill.
Think about water: if you slap it, you can make it jump over your head; and if you push and shove, you can make it stay on a mountain. But what does this have to do with the nature of water? It’s only responding to the forces around it. It’s like that for people too: you can make them evil, but that says nothing about human nature. (11.2)
It seems that it would not be too hard to develop an argument that holds that individuals respond to a positive social incentives for moral behavior, which can produce stability and predictability in a capricious natural world, and thus evolve toward greater and greater moral cooperation. The water, so to speak, will eventually evolve in such a manner as to flow downhill.
Haidt's argument seems to go off the Confucian rails, however, when he invokes religion as a key ingredient of the evolution of morality:
Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. “If we didn’t have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness,” he said. “We’d still be just small bands roving around.”
Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. “Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful,” he said.
Perhaps, in China, the foundations of morality were laid in the Shang Dynasty, which had a notion of the sacred that comes close to monotheistic religions. But it is hard to ignore the moral evolution of the Zhou Dynansty, a time of transition away from a proto-monotheism toward a broader, more open-ended, less singular and objectified notion of the sacred, in the form of an impersonal "Heaven." It is not clear to me, therefore, that we can simply sum this up as "religion."
A Mencian counterargument might hold that, while religion was important for the evolution of morality in some socio-cultural contexts, in ancient China it was more a matter of a direct expression and development of moral intuition (which Haidt recognizes) with less reliance on the sacred, per se, and more emphasis on the social. (I look forward to my recent commenter, Zoomzan, to weigh in on this. I imagine he will suggest that for the ancient Chinese it was not that the sacred was somehow less prominent but, to the contrary, it was actually more present in everything, not simply reducible to a narrow category of "religion." And that might be right...). In any event, we need to know more about how Haidt is defining "religion" in all of this.
In the end, however, Haidt comes to a formulation that has a strong Confucian resonance:
...He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together.
Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.
"Purity" might be a stretch for Confucianism, but "sanctity" might work: if we think in terms of the secular as sacred, to borrow the phrase from Fingarette.
Let's add this to the other contemporary confirmations of Mencius that have popped up in psychology and philosophy of late. And we will give him the last word:
Mencius said: “In good years, young men are mostly fine. In bad years they’re mostly cruel and violent. It isn’t that Heaven endows them with such different capacities, only that their hearts are mired in such different situations. Think about barely: if you plant the seeds carefully at the same time and in the same place, they’ll sprout and grow ripe by summer solstice. If they don’t grow the same – it’s because of the inequities in richness of soil, amounts of rainfall, or the care given by farmers. And so, all members belonging to a given species of things are the same. Why should humans be the lone exception…(11.7)
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