Free Trade is stronger in
Libertarians than Conservatives, but that's largely a matter of
only a few degrees. I think that with liberals we get just as much
crony capitalism, if not more, than from any other group.
Take this administration (PLEASE!).
David'
"Free
speech is meant to
protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition,
needs no
protection."—Neal
Boortz
On 4/29/2012 5:58 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Ernie :
You are on the money about that. This hearkens back
to Jonathan Haight,
and his research on values systems of Liberals.
Conservatives, and Libertarians.
Both kinds of "Libs" are essentially one factor types,
everything moral reduces
to compassion ( for the Left ) or freedom ( for
Libertarians ). Conservatives
seek a balance among a half dozen factors.
My guess is that we should be able to find a counterpart
weakness in
conservatism in some other area, maybe economics and
reduction
of the whole shootin' match to free trade, with Liberals
taking a
more holistic view.
Yet I was fascinated with the fact that one major factor
in morality has been
located in a specific chemical substance and that,
knowing this, something
like "moral effects" can be stimulated --not so much
with drugs, or not at all,
but as the article says, by encouraging activities that
produce oxytocin.
I will also guess --it seems really clear-- that some
religions or ethical philosophies
generate a lot of oxytocin and others very little except
in a few particulars.
Knowing this puts us in a position to empirically
evaluate religions, etc,
in terms of their effects. This is already well along in
study of religions
and economic achievement. Want to see someone bootstrap
himself / herself
to do better economically in life and be less interested
in "vices" ?
Convert the person to Pentecostalism / Charismatic
Christianity, or
Baptist faith, or Mormonism. Works like a charm.
Also very good for most Jews and Confucians.
There aren't enough Zoroastrians to be really sure, but
they also seem to belong.
So, yeah, it is smart to be wary of the kinds of
generalizations that the article
seems to imply. But there is some substance here that
seems to be quite valid.
Billy
==================================
Bizarre how liberals equate empathy ( trust) with
morality, just as they demonize vengeance ( testosterone
).
The Biblical formula "Love mercy, do justly, walk
humbly before God" is a much better (if uncomfortable)
balance.
E
Sent from my iPhone
WSJ
April 27, 2012, 7:48 p.m. ET
The Trust Molecule
Why are some
of us caring and some of us cruel, some
generous and some greedy? Paul J.
Zakon the new science of
morality— and how it could be used to create
a more virtuous society.
Could a single molecule—one chemical
substance—lie at the very center of our moral
lives?
Research that I have done over the past decade
suggests that a chemical messenger called
oxytocin accounts for why some people give
freely of themselves and others are coldhearted
louts, why some people cheat and steal and
others you can trust with your life, why some
husbands are more faithful than others, and why
women tend to be nicer and more generous than
men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin
appears to be the chemical elixir that creates
bonds of trust not just in our intimate
relationships but also in our business dealings,
in politics and in society at large.
Known primarily as a female reproductive
hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during
labor, which is where many women encounter it as
Pitocin, the synthetic version that doctors
inject in expectant mothers to induce delivery.
Oxytocin is also responsible for the calm,
focused attention that mothers lavish on their
babies while breast-feeding. And it is abundant,
too, on wedding nights (we hope) because it
helps to create the warm glow that both women
and men feel during sex, a massage or even a
hug.
Since 2001, my colleagues and I have conducted
a number of experiments showing that when
someone's level of oxytocin goes up, he or she
responds more generously and caringly, even with
complete strangers. As a benchmark for measuring
behavior, we relied on the willingness of our
subjects to share real money with others in real
time. To measure the increase in oxytocin, we
took their blood and analyzed it. Money comes in
conveniently measurable units, which meant that
we were able to quantify the increase in
generosity by the amount someone was willing to
share. We were then able to correlate these
numbers with the increase in oxytocin found in
the blood.
Later, to be certain that what we were seeing
was true cause and effect, we sprayed synthetic
oxytocin into our subjects' nasal passages—a way
to get it directly into their brains. Our
conclusion: We could turn the behavioral
response on and off like a garden hose. (Don't
try this at home: Oxytocin inhalers aren't
available to consumers in the U.S.)
More strikingly, we found that you don't need
to shoot a chemical up someone's nose, or have
sex with them, or even give them a hug in order
to create the surge in oxytocin that leads to
more generous behavior. To trigger this "moral
molecule," all you have to do is give someone a
sign of trust. When one person extends himself
to another in a trusting way—by, say, giving
money—the person being trusted experiences a
surge in oxytocin that makes her less likely to
hold back and less likely to cheat. Which is
another way of saying that the feeling of being
trusted makes a person more…trustworthy. Which,
over time, makes other people more inclined to
trust, which in turn…
If you detect the makings of an endless loop
that can feed back onto itself, creating what
might be called a virtuous circle—and ultimately
a more virtuous society—you are getting the
idea.
Obviously, there is more to it, because no one
chemical in the body functions in isolation, and
other factors from a person's life experience
play a role as well. Things can go awry. In our
studies, we found that a small percentage of
subjects never shared any money; analysis of
their blood indicated that their oxytocin
receptors were malfunctioning. But for everyone
else, oxytocin orchestrates the kind of generous
and caring behavior that [ not every ] every
culture endorses as the right way to live—the
cooperative, benign, pro-social way of living
that every culture on the planet describes as
"moral." The Golden Rule is a lesson that the
body already knows, and when we get it right, we
feel the rewards immediately.
This isn't to say that oxytocin always makes us
good or generous or trusting. In our
rough-and-tumble world, an unwavering response
of openness and loving kindness would be like
going around with a "kick me" sign on your back.
Instead, the moral molecule works like a
gyroscope, helping us to maintain our balance
between behavior based on trust and behavior
based on wariness and distrust. In this way
oxytocin helps us to navigate between the social
benefits of openness—which are considerable—and
the reasonable caution that we need to avoid
being taken for a ride.
Consider a real-life experiment that I
conducted with a bride named Linda Geddes. A
writer for the British magazine New Scientist,
Linda had been following my research and thought
it would be fun to see if the emotional uplift
of her wedding would alter the guests' levels of
oxytocin.
I arrived at the venue, a Victorian manor house
in the English countryside, with a 150-pound
centrifuge and 70 pounds of dry ice. I unpacked
my equipment—syringes, 156 prelabeled test
tubes, tourniquets, alcohol preps, Band-Aids—and
got to work. The plan that I'd worked out with
Linda was to take two samples from a cross
section of the friends and family in
attendance—one draw of blood immediately before
the vows and one immediately after.
After all the blood had been drawn, I slipped
out with my test tubes nestled in their cushion
of dry ice. It took two weeks for the samples to
arrive at my California lab via FedEx, but the
results showed just what we were hoping for: a
simple snapshot of oxytocin's ability to read
and reflect the nuances of a social situation.
The changes in individual oxytocin levels at
Linda's ceremony could be mapped out like the
solar system, with the bride as the sun. Between
the first and second draws of blood, which were
only an hour apart, Linda's own level shot up by
28%. For the other people tested, the increase
in oxytocin was in direct proportion to the
likely intensity of their emotional engagement
in the event. The mother of the bride? Up 24%.
The father of the groom? Up 19%. The groom
himself? Up 13%…and on down the line.
But why, you may ask, would the groom's
increase be less than his father's? Testosterone
is one of several other hormones that can
interfere with the release of oxytocin, and the
groom's testosterone level, according to our
blood test, had surged 100%! As the guests
admired Linda in her strapless bridal gown, he
was the alpha male.
Our study at the wedding had demonstrated just
the kind of graded and contingent sensitivity
that allows oxytocin to guide us between trust
and wariness, generosity and self-protection.
Should I feel safe and warm and cuddly in this
crowd, or do I have to be on guard? Or maybe it
is a situation in which the best outcome results
from oxytocin dominating in one person and
testosterone driving the other.
It is the sensitivity of oxytocin in its
interaction with a range of other chemical
messengers that helps to account for why human
behavior is so infinitely complex—and why the
bliss of the wedding day (and night) is often
hard to maintain. (Consider the old joke about
the guy who couldn't understand why his wife was
unhappy. "I told you that I loved you when I
asked you to marry me," he said. "I don't see
why I need to tell you again.")
But there is a larger payoff from this
research: After centuries of speculation about
human nature and how we decide what is the right
thing to do, we at last have some news we can
use—empirical evidence that illuminates the
mechanism at the heart of our moral guidance
system. So what can we do to shift behavior a
bit more toward the _expression_ of oxytocin and
thus improve the workings of our entire society?
The experiments I have conducted show that many
group activities—singing, dancing, praying—cause
the release of oxytocin and promote connection
and caring. As social creatures, we have created
activities that prompt the _expression_ of
oxytocin in order to foster connection to
others. In fact, those who release the most
oxytocin when they are trusted are happier and
healthier because they have richer social lives.
Even the sort of "social snacking" that happens
through Twitter or checking out a friend's
Facebook page can prompt an oxytocin surge. But
the real criterion for success is whether these
online activities complement more substantial
personal connections. Does this form of
communication foster human bonds or does it
foster anonymity and abstraction to the point of
cutting off empathy?
Another approach to tune oxytocin release is to
seek exposure to people outside our own families
or cultural and geographic "tribes." There are
solid evolutionary reasons why our species
developed the tendency to be wary of those whose
physical appearances or behavioral patterns are
different from our own. For millions of years an
individual's social world was limited almost
entirely to her village and tribe, and outsiders
were, for good reason, considered a threat until
proven otherwise. Yet research has shown that
this suspicion is malleable, and it fades with
exposure.
With worries on the rise about the country's
cultural and political divisions, some bottom-up
boosts of oxytocin, based on face-to-face
interaction, could help. It might take the form
of a domestic student-exchange program, allowing
kids from the big cities and small-town, rural
kids to get to know one another. The
revitalization of urban life, with its varied
and crosscutting relationships, is a step in the
right direction, too. One city going in the
opposite direction is Washington, D.C., where
fraternizing across party lines—once the norm—is
nearly unheard of these days. Acrimony on
Capitol Hill reflects, in part, these
oxytocin-starved relationships.
A few years ago, I began warning visitors to my
lab that before they left, I was going to give
them a hug. This scares some people, but I've
found that my slightly eccentric announcement
changes the depth of the conversation, making it
more intimate, more engaging and more valuable
to us both. I suspect that by forecasting a hug,
I'm also signaling how much I trust the person,
so I'm inducing a release of oxytocin in their
brains. Those people, in turn, will connect
better to others and treat them more generously.
Nothing grander is required for a virtuous
circle to begin.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
|
