Liberty and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

This is the third essay in a series on the relationship between rules, freedom, and prosperity.
Read part 1 on Skepticblog.org and part 2 over at True/Slant.

I believe that the following commentary on the necessity of law and order has some bearing on what is unfolding in Arizona—when the rules are not clearly written or consistently enforced, people will take the law into their own hands because society cannot run smoothly without law and order.

In Part 3 in my essay series on the relationship between rules, freedom, and prosperity, I want to turn to one of my favorite films, John Ford’s 1962 classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which a clash of moralities unfolds in the wild-west frontier town of Shinbone, Arizona. There in the dusty streets and ramshackle buildings two self-contained and self-consistent moral codes come into conflict. One moral code is the Cowboy Ethic, where trust is established through courage, loyalty, and personal allegiance to friends and family, and where disputes are settled and justice is served between individuals who have taken the law into their own hands. The other moral code is the Law Ethic, where trust is established through the transparent and mutually-agreed upon rule of law, and where disputes are settled and justice is served between all members of the society who, by virtue of living there, have tacitly agreed to obey the rules. Only one of these moral codes can prevail.

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Cowboy Ethic is represented by two people, one good and the other evil. John Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, is a fiercely loyal and deeply honest gunslinger duty-bound to enforce justice on his own terms through the power of his presence backed by the gun on his hip. Lee Marvin’s title character, Liberty Valance, is a coarse and unkempt highwayman whose unruly behavior provokes fights with the locals, most of whom fear and loathe him.

The Law Ethic is represented by Jimmy Stewart’s character, Ransom Stoddard, an attorney hell bent on seeing his beloved Shinbone make the transition from cowboy justice to the rule of law. Employing the commonly-used flashback technique, John Ford opens his film at the end of the story with the funeral of Tom Doniphon, which is attended by an elderly Stoddard swamped by reporters inquiring why the now-distinguished U.S. Senator would bother returning to his native town just to be present at the memorial services of a down-and-out gunfighter.

When they were younger and coming of age in this western territory just slightly out of reach of the long arm of the law, Stoddard and Doniphon were of radically different minds when it came to how justice should be served, each believing that the other’s strategy is either outdated (Doniphon’s gun) or naïve (Stoddard’s law). Despite this difference, or perhaps because of it, they become faithful friends, both believing that in the end justice must prevail. When Liberty Valance arrives on the scene it is clear that he respects only one man, Tom Doniphon, because they share the Cowboy Ethic that men settle their disputes honorably between themselves. As Doniphon boasted, “Liberty Valance is the toughest man south of the Picketwire—next to me.” But Valance’s disdain for the milksop Stoddard and his naïve notions about the effectiveness of the law knows no bounds. Entering a restaurant where Stoddard is dining, for example, Valance berates him, taunts him, and finally trips the waiter, sending Stoddard’s dinner to the floor. As Stoddard meekly tries to avoid a confrontation, Doniphon enters and stares down Valance, who snaps back, “you lookin’ for trouble, Doniphon?” In his inimitable John Wayne drawl, Doniphon responds, “You aimin’ to help me find some?” Valance caves to Doniphon’s challenge and scurries out of the restaurant. “Well now; what do you supposed caused him to leave?” Doniphon wonders rhetorically. The sardonic response from a patron in reference to the impotency of Stoddard’s philosophy reveals which ethic is still dominant: “Why it was the specter of law and order rising from the gravy and the mashed potatoes.”

Despite Valance’s constant taunting, Stoddard holds to his belief that until Valance is caught doing something illegal there can be no justice. When Doniphon tells Stoddard “You better start pack’n a handgun,” Stoddard rejoins, “I don’t want to kill him. I just want to put him in jail.” At long last, however, Stoddard can take the derision no more, so he decides to take Doniphon’s advice that “out here a man settles his own problems,” and turns to him for gun-fighting lessons. When Valance challenges Stoddard to a dual, the overconfident naïf accepts and a late-night showdown ensues. In a darkened street, the two men square off. Stoddard is trembling in fear while Valance mocks and scorns him, shooting first too high and then too low. When Valance takes aim to kill, Stoddard shakily draws his weapon and discharges it. Valance collapses in a heap. Having felled one of the toughest guns in the west Stoddard goes on to become a local hero, building that image into political capital and working his way up from local politics to a distinguished career as a United States Senator. It appears that the Law Ethic prevailed over the Cowboy Ethic.

Not so fast. The man who shot Liberty Valance was Tom Doniphon. Knowing that Stoddard was no match for Valance, in a replay of the dual we see Doniphon lurking in the shadows and fingering a rifle, which he engaged to kill Valance at the crucially-timed moment when the two men drew their weapons. Holding to the cowboy ethic of loyalty and friendship, Doniphon takes the secret to his grave, where at the end of the story Stoddard is now paying his respect. When Stoddard finally reveals to a newspaper reporter the truth about who really shot Liberty Valance, the paper decides not to print the truth because, in what has become one of the most memorable lines in filmic history, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Despite this being a typical shoot-em-up western film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains many moral subtleties. The philosopher Patrick Grim, who called my attention to the film as a tale of moral conflict, notes that both Stoddard and Doniphon violated their principles, but they did so because this was the only means by which one moral code could displace the other. By agreeing to a dual with Valance, Stoddard adopted a form of conflict resolution that he previously deemed illegal and immoral, and after discovering the truth about who really shot Liberty Valance, he chose to live a lie of omission then capitalized on his unearned heroism. For his part, Doniphon violated his moral code by ambushing Valance from the shadows instead of facing him man to man in the street, and then hiding the truth about what really happened, thereby tacitly endorsing Stoddard’s faux use of the Cowboy Ethic in order to help bring about the Law Ethic. In fact, both men violated both codes of morality, and with ample irony the only person who did not violate his moral code was the scurrilous Liberty Valance. But in the end, as Shinbone grew in size the transition from one moral code to the other had to happen, and in this moral homily it was friendship and loyalty that facilitated the change. It was the psychology of trust between individuals that enabled a society of trust among the collective to come to fruition.

The fictional Shinbone embodies any small community in transition from an informal to a formal moral code and system of justice. As long as population numbers are low and everyone in a community is either related to one another or knows one another through regular interactions, the code of the cowboy can work relatively well to keep the peace and ensure trust and social stability. But when communities expand and population numbers increase, the opportunities for unchecked violations of such informal codes expands exponentially, requiring the creation of such social technologies as codes, courts, and constitutions.

Continue reading part 4 over at True/Slant.

This review of The Brain and the Meaning of Life by Paul Thagard (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2010. ISBN 9780691142722) appeared in Science Vol. 328, Issue 5979 in May 2010.

Twice I have spoken at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference. Twice I have begrudgingly agreed to the strictly enforced 18-minute talk format—grumbling that “ideas worth spreading” (the TED motto) could not possibly be conveyed in such a constrained format. And twice have I been proven wrong. With discipline and diligence you really can say something of substance in a tight space, and more than 200 million downloads of endlessly entertaining and educational videos prove the principle of pithiness. (continue reading…)

As the SEC prepares its case against Goldman Sachs for allegedly intentionally defrauding the public with toxic securities that it created, sold, then bet against, I want to reflect for a moment on the need for rules in a free market society. Critics of capitalism believe that we libertarians want an essentially lawless society in which people are free to do whatever they want. That may be true for some libertarians, but I have come to believe through experience and science that free markets operate best within a system of clearly defined and strictly enforced rules and laws. Within the system itself markets should be as free as possible and people should be free to trade with whomever they want without interference from the state (think Chinese citizens trading ideas about democracy with each other and outsiders), but good rules make good capitalists.

Consider a sports analogy: In 1982, three other men and I founded the 3,000-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America (RAAM) from L.A. to New York, sponsored by Budweiser and televised on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The rules were simple: each cyclist takes the same route, has a support vehicle and crew that follows behind providing food, drink, and equipment, and no drafting behind or hanging onto a vehicle is allowed. The race started on the Santa Monica Pier in California. The first cyclist to reach the Empire State Building in New York City would be declared the winner. That was the entire set of rules, which we didn’t even bother to write down.

All four of us finished the race and the next year dozens of cyclists wanted to compete so we began to outline some rules. During that first race, for example, it wasn’t clear what to do with a rider who went off course—can he get a ride in his support vehicle back to the route where he left it? (yes), can he be driven up the route the same distance he rode off course? (no). Although no drafting was allowed, it is often windy out on the open plains, and if there is a cross-wind from your left when your support vehicle comes alongside to hand off water bottles and food, there is a noticeable drafting effect. Not to mention that ten days is a long time to ride by yourself, so it is psychologically advantageous to have your support crew to talk to for long stretches. So we had to draft extensive rules defining how long a handoff can last (one minute), how many times an hour (four), with room for exceptions to the rule, such as if the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, in which case the number of handoffs is unrestricted.

Once you start writing down what people can and cannot do, the list grows exponentially. As the years moved on and the race grew in popularity, the rulebook expanded with it. Women entered in 1984, so we added rules about gender divisions. Cyclists over 50 and 60 years of age wanted to race, so we added rules about age divisions. Four-man relay teams entered in 1989, so we created a new set of rules just for them, that subsequently had to be expanded to encompass two-person relay teams, men-and-women relay teams, age division relay teams, and even corporate relay teams. Every year something would happen that led to more rules. In the 1989 race one of the competitors was riding slowly up the long grade of Oak Creek Canyon from Sedonna to Flagstaff, Arizona, with his two vans and motorhome all caravanning behind him, preventing cars from safely passing. This went on for miles until someone called the police, but by the time the officers arrived they could only find the next rider back, whom they stopped on the side of the road, thereby disrupting his pace and costing him time, which we had to subtract from his overall finishing time. Another year, also in Arizona, we had a similar problem on a busy stretch of Highway 89, after which someone called the Arizona Department of Transportation to complain, resulting in a post-race ruling by the DOT that RAAM could only pass through Arizona during the day. As this would have obviated the nonstop nature of the race, I had to negotiate a deal with the Arizona DOT with a proviso in the rules that read: “The Follow Vehicle may not impede following traffic for more than one minute. The Follow Vehicle must pull off the road and let traffic pass when five or more vehicles are waiting to pass regardless of time. During the day the rider may proceed alone, with the Follow Vehicle catching up once traffic is clear. At night the rider must also pull off the road.”

One especially hot year one of the RAAM riders happened upon a small hotel pool while passing through a diminutive Western town, so he dismounted his bike and leaped into the pool, fully attired in cycling clothes, shoes, gloves, and helmet. Someone called the police, and once again by the time they arrived the pool perpetrator was gone, so they pulled over the next competitor that happened along, thereby disrupting his pace. This led to yet another rule, this one prohibiting competitors from swimming in public pools without permission from the owner. Most of the racers enjoy listening to music, either from small earbud phones or from speakers mounted on the roof of their following vehicle, which led to two additional problems: one, blasting music through tiny earphones jammed in your ears makes it difficult to hear oncoming traffic, ambulances, and the like; two, passing through small towns in the middle of the night blasting rock-n-roll music from loudspeakers tends to awaken the locals. Thus, two new rules were added, one restricting the use of only one earphone and the other curtailing the broadcasting of music during hours of darkness.

All of these new rules, of course, require the addition of appropriate punishments for violations, which we assessed in time penalties. However, an exhausted cyclist who is forced by an official to take time off the bike in the middle of the race may actually benefit from the penalty, so we had to write even more rules about where and when the penalties would be served, which we determined would be in a penalty “box” ten miles from the finish line (and, yes, we have had cyclists passed by competitors while sitting there on the side of the road). More rules and penalties mean more officials needed to assess them, and therefore more potential for subjective misjudgments on the part of officials (who are often sleep-deprived and exhausted themselves), so we had to add yet another set of rules that allow the cyclists to challenge the officials’ assessed penalties, and a set of guidelines for the Race Director to make a final evaluation before the end of the race if such a challenge is made, as well as a post-race board to hear one final appeal by the athlete if he or she feels that both the official and the Race Director made the wrong decision. Finally, we created a nonprofit governing body—the Ultra-Marathon Cycling Association (UMCA)—to oversee the entire sport, including and especially the development and adjudication of the rules.

The structure and development of this sporting event and the rules that govern it—as quotidian an example as it is—serves as an analogue for society at large. In its simplicity, sports can help clarify and illuminate the evolution and operations of more complex and nuanced social institutions. Just as good rules make good competitors, good walls make good neighbors and good laws make good citizens. People naturally want what is best for themselves, but most people also want what is fair for others. Without a structure in place to create and enforce firm and fair rules to meet both of these needs, people become more self-centered than other-centered, and if you go far enough down that path it degenerates into Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, “the war of all against all.”

Now, my libertarian friends, don’t panic thinking I’ve gone soft in the head liberal about creating obsessive government regulations in the economy. In this post I’ll demonstrate how industries naturally create their own set of rules from the bottom-up, and that these can serve as useful guidelines for top-down regulators.

The comparative method of historical science helps to explain Haiti’s poverty

HISTORY IS NOT OFTEN THOUGHT OF AS A SCIENCE, but it can be if it uses the “comparative method.” Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and James A. Robinson, professor of government at Harvard University, employ the method effectively in the new book they have co-edited, Natural Experiments of History. (Order the lecture on DVD. Jared Diamond lectured, based on this book, as part of the Skeptics Society’s Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech.) In a timely study comparing Haiti with the Dominican Republic, for example, Diamond demonstrates that although both countries inhabit the same island, Hispaniola, because of geopolitical differences one ended up dirt poor while the other flourished. (continue reading…)

On April 10 the Wall Street Journal published a debate between myself and Gregory Paul on the question of whether or not belief in God is innate. Here are the links to the two articles:

http://tinyurl.com/y8n7qg6
http://tinyurl.com/y52ckwf

The online version was well edited but shorter than my original draft, which I present here just for the record. Enjoy.

According to Oxford University Press’s World Christian Encyclopedia, 84 percent of the world’s population belongs to some form of organized religion, which at the end of 2009 equals 5.7 billion people who belong to about 10,000 distinct religions, each one of which may be further subdivided and classified. Christians, for example, may be aportioned among 33,820 different denominations.¹ Among the many bionomial designations granted our species (Homo sapiens, Homo ludens, Homo economicus), a strong case could be made for Homo religiosus. And Americans are among the most religious members of the species. In a 2007 Pew Forum survey of over 35,000 Americans, the following percentages of belief were found:

• God or a universal spirit: 92%
• Heaven: 74%
• Hell: 59%
• Scripture is word of God: 63%
• Pray once a day: 58%
• Miracles: 79%

So powerful is the belief that there must be something else out there that even 21% of those who identified themselves as atheists and 55% of those who identified themselves as agnostics expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit.²

Why do so many people believe in God? Although there is much cultural variation among different religious faiths, all have in common the belief in supernatural agents in the form of God, gods, or spirits who have intention and interact with us in the world. There are four lines of evidence pointing to the conclusion that such beliefs are hardwired into our brains.

Evolutionary Theory and God

In his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin noted that anthropologists conclude that “a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder.”³ Why would religion and belief in God evolve? Darwin suggested that it might accentuate group cohesiveness in the competition against other groups: “There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection (of the group).”⁴

Picking up where Darwin left off, in my book How We Believe I developed an evolutionary model of belief in God as one of a suite of mechanisms used by religion, which I define as a social institution to create and promote myths, to encourage conformity and altruism, and to signal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of a community. Around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, as bands and tribes began to coalesce into chiefdoms and states, even before the invention of government, religions were the first social institutions to codify moral behaviors into ethical principles, and God evolved as the ultimate enforcer of the rules.⁵

Human universals are traits shared by all peoples, such as tool use, myths, sex roles, social groups, aggression, gestures, grammar, phonemes, and many related to religion and belief in God, including: anthropomorphizing animals and objects, belief in the supernatural, beliefs and rituals about death, beliefs about fortune and misfortune, divination, folklore, magic, myths, and rituals. Although such universals are not totally controlled by genes alone (almost nothing is), there are good reasons to believe that there is a strong genetic predisposition for these traits to be expressed within their respective cultures. That is, your culture may dictate which God to believe in, but the belief in a supernatural agent who operates in the world is universal to all cultures because it is hard-wired in the brain, a conclusion enhanced by studies on identical twins separated at birth and raised in different environments.

Behavior Genetics and God

In one study of 53 pairs of identical twins reared apart and 31 pairs of fraternal twins reared apart, Niels Waller, Thomas Bouchard, and their colleagues in the Minnesota twins project looked at five different measures of religiosity and found that the correlations between identical twins were typically double those for fraternal twins, a finding suggesting that genetic factors account for approximately half of the observed variance in their measures of religious beliefs.⁶

This finding was corroborated by two much larger twin studies out of Australia (3,810 pairs of twins) and England (825 pairs of twins), that compared identical and fraternal twins on numerous measures of beliefs and social attitudes, concluding that approximately 55 percent of the variance in religious attitudes appears to be genetic.⁷ The scientists also concluded that people who grow up in religious families who themselves later become religious do so mostly because they have inherited a disposition, from one or both parents, to resonate positively with religious sentiments. Without such a genetic disposition, the religious teachings of parents appear to have few lasting effects.

Of course, genes do not determine whether one chooses Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, or any other religion. Rather, belief in supernatural agents (God, angels, and demons) and commitment to certain religious practices (church attendance, prayer, rituals) appears to reflect genetically based cognitive processes (inferring the existence of invisible agents) and personality traits (respect for authority, traditionalism). Why did we inherit this tendency?

Cognitive Psychology and God

Long long ago, in a Paleolithic environment far far away from the modern world, humans evolved to find meaningful causal patterns in nature to make sense of the world, and infuse many of those patterns with intentional agency, some of which became animistic spirits and powerful gods. I call these two processes patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data) and agenticity (the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency).

Imagine that you are a hominid on the planes of Africa and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator or just the wind? If you assume the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it is just the wind, you have made a Type I error (a false positive), but to no harm. But if you believe the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator, you have made a Type II error (a false negative) and there’s a good chance you’ll be lunch and thereby removed from your species’ gene pool. Because we are poor at discriminating between false positives and false negatives, and because the cost of making a Type I error is much lower than making a Type II error, there was a natural selection for those hominids who tended to believe that all patterns are real and potentially dangerous. This is the basis for the belief not only in God, but in souls, spirits, ghosts, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, and all manner of invisible agents intending to harm us or help us.

Gods are agents and agents are essences, and agenticity is everywhere. Subjects watching reflective dots move about in a darkened room (especially if the dots take on the shape of two legs and two arms) infer that they represent a person or intentional agent. Children believe that the sun can think and follows them around, and when asked to draw a picture of the sun they often add a smiley face to give agency to sol. Genital-shaped foods such as bananas and oysters are often believed to enhance sexual potency. A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality or essence is transplanted with the organ, and studies show that most people say that they would never wear the sweater of a murderer, showing great disgust (probably an evolved emotion selected to avoid rotting food and disease-carrying substances), but that they would wear the cardigan sweater of the childrens’ television host Mr. Rogers, believing that it would make them better persons.

Neuroscience and God

Why God? In my analogy above, note that “wind” represents an inanimate force whereas “dangerous predator” indicates an intentional agent. There is a big difference between an inanimate force and an intentional agent. Most animals can make this distinction on the superficial life-or-death level, but we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex we have a Theory of Mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others. We “read minds” by projecting ourselves into someone else’s shoes (as in empathy) or by imagining someone out to get us (as in fear).

Theory of Mind is part of a larger mind-brain dualism, in which we tend to think of the mind as something separate from the brain. We speak of “my body” as if “my” and “body” are dissimilar. We revel in books and films that are dualistic, as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis in which a man falls asleep and wakes up as a cockroach with the man’s personality intact inside it, or in Freaky Friday where mother and daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan) trade bodies with their essences unbroken. This belief in mind and essence is a byproduct of the brain’s inability to perceive itself. Thus, we can “decenter” ourselves and imagine, say, being on a beach in Hawaii, which most people tend to see from above looking down on themselves as if out of their bodies. Out-of-body and Near-Death Experiences can both be triggered by electromagnetic fields bombarding the temporal lobes (just above the ears) of the brain, as well as through oxygen deprivation in pilot centrifuge training exercises. As well there is the well-known “third-man factor” in which solo sailors, mountain climbers, ultra-marathon athletes, and arctic explorers report a sensed presence of someone else on the expedition.

We believe in the supernatural because we believe in the natural and we cannot discriminate between the two. We create gods because we are natural-born supernaturalists, driven by our tendency to find meaningful patterns and impart to them intentional agency. The gods will always be with us because they are hard-wired into our brains.

References

1. Barrett, D. B., G. T. Kurian, T. M. Johnson (Eds.). 2001. World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World. 2 Vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape-study-key-findings.pdf
3. Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man. London: John Murray, Vol. 2, 395.
4. Ibid., Vol. 1, 166.
5. Shermer, Michael. 1999. How We Believe. New York: Henry Holt/Times Books.
6. Waller, N.G., B. Kojetin, T. Bouchard, D. Lykken, and A. Tellegen. 1990. “Genetic and environmental influences on religious attitudes and values: A study of twins reared apart and together.” Psychological Science 1(2): 138–42.
7. Martin, N. G., L. J. Eaves, A. C. Heath, R. Jardine, L. M. Feingold, and H. J. Eysenck. 1986. Transmission of social attitudes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 83: 4364–68.
8. Eaves, L. J., H. J. Eysenck, and N. G. Martin. 1989. Genes, culture and personality: An empirical approach. London and San Diego: Academic Press.