Lesson eight Part five. Being an Animal. Animal metaphor's. Haidts got 'em. Plato's got 'em. Buddhas got 'em. Holdo's got 'em. Who's got good one's? Healthy one's. And one they really come too. When you try to say with the truth is that they're trying to express. I think Haidt's got good ones and Plato's ultimately's got some suspect ones. Actually morally suspect ones. I don't know a lot about Buddha, but I sort of suspect he may have Plato's problems. As to my own, I'm too close to my own work to be able to tell if I'm building in good features. I'm like a Prometheus that way. But getting back to Haidt, his basically good metaphors. Are actually sort of entangled in some of the bad ones. In ways we should disentangle and correct. You see? I'm taking Haidt's side here. And I'm not defending Plato. Just so you know I'm capable of doing such a thing. Haidt opens his book with an animal rider parable. Which informs our sense of the metaphor as he develops it. He was riding a horse along a canyon, he panicked, but of course the horse didn't jump into the canyon just because this rider was an inexperienced idiot when it came to riding horses. The horse did the thing it had done 1000 times before. It walked along the trail, went home to dinner. Haidt lived to tell this little morality tale about the wisdom of the beasts. A fine animal rider story, a paradigm in it's way. Then again, not. Most stories of trained, domesticated animals are not stories about animals doing more or less than that. Naturally, and that working out okay. While they're incompetent handlers stand by wondering what to do with their hands. When Buddha says his mind is like a rider on a wild elephant, the idea is not that the elephant is mostly doing what comes naturally, and a good thing. The idea is that animal nature has been very significantly diverted from it's natural course. And a good thing too. Think about how unnatural it is in elephant terms to be, say an Indian war elephant. Riding into battle, facing flames and weapons and advancing rather than running like hell for the hills. I'm not saying Buddha was thinking about war elephants in particular, with his rider metaphor. Metaphor. Buddha wasn't a warrior at heart, I think. But he wasn't thinking of just letting the animal do it's own thing like Haidt's horse that didn't want to commit suicide by jumping into a canyon. Plato's chariot here is much the same. I'm not an expert, but my distinct impression is that chariots are not the sorts of things that you let just any inexperienced person take the reigns to. To drive, chariots tend to crash and when they do my impression is it can get pretty awful. So, two models of normal rider animal relationship it should say. One, let the animal do what comes naturally and it will mostly be okay. Two, mostly make the animal do something that doesn't come to naturally for it. Haidt is mostly selling the former, Plato and Buddha I think are mostly selling the latter. So it's a little bit misleading, I mean maybe it's just extra freiendliness on Haidt's part to say that he's just updating some of their ancient wisdom when he's really revising them. The basic moral of the story, he's proposing a kind of egalitarianism where even dominance of the rider by the elephant. Reason, slave to the passions. Who's right? Or more right about who should rule? Haidt, I would say, to a very considerable extent. Put it this way. Why is it so easy for Haidt to propose that our moral judgement is. Functionally a dog, without all of us just saying, no way that's impossible I'll never accept such a shocking truth. We all love dogs. Honesty compels me to admit I'm more of a cat person. But I love dogs. Why? Dogs can have jobs to do of course guarding or hunting. I could love a dog as a useful tool but I'm fairly typical, born an American I think, in thinking the dog's job is to add value by just being a dog. Dogs are not man's best tool. They're man's best friend. Friends are not means to good ends. They're goods in themselves. Selves. I've been quoting a lot of kids movies in this course. You probably guessed I like animation and cartoons. I have young daughters. Anyway, I went to see Mr. Peabody and Sherman over the weekend, which is sort of the ultimate smart animal stupid human setup. Mr. Peabody, if you don't know, is a very smart dog. One of the plot points is that Sherman, the boy, is mocked by other kids for being a dog. Because he's sort of owned by a dog, note where I'm going with this. Haidt says we're kind of owned by dogs, too. Well anyway, back to the movie. Sherman doesn't like this, all the other kids calling him a dog. But, I saw this coming a mile away. By the end of the movie, there just has to be a Spartacus parody in which first Sherman, and then all the other humans who learned this important life lesson, stand up and say I'm a dog, too! Eh, not the greatest movie, but it's a nice moment. Very morally natural. Very morally natural for us modern viewers. And what they're saying is not that we are all omniscientifically competent like the preposterously fictional Mr. Peabody. He's a very undoggy dog. But rather, we're all dogs. We're proud to be because we're devoted and loving. All the reasons that people love dogs. Come to think of it, why should being called, why should being called a dog be an insult? Who would ever be ashamed of being a dog, after all? Well, the ancients I think would have been kind of ashamed of being a dog. Peabody and Sharman is not any great breakthrough in story-telling. But I don't think the Ancients would have told it like that. When Lucious was turned into an ass in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, he learned some life lessons about how the other half lives. He's an aristocrat. Well, he was before he turned into an ass. But suddenly, he's a beast of burden. You might think that the story would end with him finally losing his outer donkey. By embracing is inner donkey. It's only when he finally accepts his fate, maybe because he's prpared to settle down and live a quiet donkey life, with that nice lady donkey he met. Then's the moment he would be transform back into a human, right? You can only be truly human when you can accept being an animal, that is, when you can internalize the wisdom of the animals, that thing you never would have learned if you hadn't been turned into a donkey. And ever after, he would be kind to animals. That would be his deal. That's how Disney would film it but without so much sex. But no. In the end, Lucious is pretty much turned back human by his religious devotion to Isis. Point is, it's bad to be animal. That's the ancient wisdom of the story. Animal, bad. You suffer as an animal in order to purify yourself and become not an animal. There's a certain amount of sympathy for the fate of animals. Like I said, you get to see how the other half lives, but if you have to live like that for a while, that's only because it's spiritually educational, not because you have to learn to be like them, you go down into darkness, the better to arise into full purity. Think about Buddhism and reincarnation or [UNKNOWN] and reincarnation. The point of being an animal for a while, is to learn how best to completely not be an animal ever after. That's the ancient way to tell the story. Getting back to height. As I emphasized in previous videos, for him, it's a key insight that the highest in us, our capacity for transcendence [INAUDIBLE]. For religious feelings. For unity with our neighbors. It's a function in the lowest in us. Are keen nose for bad smells just for example. I haven't really listened to all the arguments for that. Read his books for all means. Let me try to give you some further practical sense of where Haidt is coming from. While also folding in, some reasons for doubt. I said our inner elephant if for Haidt a nobly transcendent beast. At least potentially. We can only rise into the light upon it's back. We a little rational writer. But then again I could have said, you know, in what sense the elephant is transcendent. The elephant like to click on all those up worthy links it sees when it's surfing. Been around on the web. It likes the little jolt of righteousness. It likes to feel meaningful, redeemed, connected to humanity. It wants it to feel it's aware of really matters, right now. Pass it on. See the problem? Upworthy is maybe kind of a bargain basement substitute for true transcendence. On the one hand, the elephant just wants a peanut every minute. On the other hand, the elephant wants a sense of transcendence, solution. Give it a peanut that will give it a sense of transcendence, that's the up-worthy model in case you haven't visited the web for the last year or so. To repeat, the elephant likes to click on up-worthy links and maybe that's good or maybe that's a sign of the limitations of being an elephant in height sense. I would say that Plato has a sense of this critique I just made even though he never read Haidt, and he never heard of up-worthy. But Plato has problems of his own. Let me explain. Let me propose a really odd idea that has never occurred to you and for good reason because it's obviously wrong. If utilitarianism is true, happiness is the, if, if happiness for the, is the greatest good for the greatest number. That's the greatest thing. Well then probably the thing that will make people truly happy is probably reading books about happiness, right? The happiness hypothesis for example. If I would read that I will be lead to contemplate rationally the form of the good of happiness itself. What could make me happier than thinking about happiness itself. Hey Halbo, people say, why don't you come over to our party tonight? Naw, I think I'm going to stay inside and just think about happiness. Maybe I'll, read a book about happiness. It's more direct. Please daddy, play with us. Cry my lovely daughters. No I'm sorry my dears. I think I'll just contemplate a form of happiness itself rather than sink down to the animal level of play in the hopes of rising up to happiness. I recommend that you do the same eventually, when you grow up. That's silly. You don't get happy by contemplating. In happiness itself, rationally. No one is ever going to say that they were the happiest they have ever been while reading The Happiness Hypothesis, because it was just so happy on every page. That was when they were closest to pure happiness itself, a rational form of it. And Happiness Hypothesis is suppose to make people happy. Happier but, not like that. That's just crazy and no-one would think to advertise it like that. So if the idea is so stupid why am I bringing it up? Riddle me that, because Plato kind of believes it I think. Our highest felicity is contemplating the form of the good? So philosophy is ultimately the royal road to happiness. I could get all clever at this point, trying to explain how this isn't as implausible as it sounds, but frankly I kind of think it is. I could try to argue that Plato doesn't really mean it when he seems to imply this thing but in fact I kind of think he does, question is, why? The only true answer is I really don't know, I'm not his therapist. In general we should always remember that there're any number of plausible hence believable stories to be told about someone like Plato. Let me tell you two very different ones. Different so that, with a little luck, you don't believe either, but they're both good to think about. So the story goes. Plato gave one public lecture on the good. He delivered one Ted Talk to the good people of Athens. Total disaster. He talked about mathematics and no one understood him. He flopped. What gives? What gave? I don't know. Maybe he was like Daniel Tamond, who I talked about last lesson. Not that Plato has Asperger's or had any social problem. I'm quite sure someone as psychologically perceptive as Plato did not have any trouble relating to the social and psychological and trickiness of human life, but maybe he was also kind of number mystic, inspired by studying the Pythagoreans. Maybe Plato personally did have intense even ecstatic experiences that he thought of, also as highly rational. Enthusiastic mathematics of the mind. If Plato was like that, then he wasn't like, much like me. So maybe I don't understand him very well, it could be. Here's another story. Plato was an aristocrat, a member of the hereditary ruling class in Athens. I thought they were a democracy you say. Yeah, but you know how it goes. They still had a ruling class, the rich and powerful. They do tend to pass that on to their kids one way or another but what does Plato, the aristocrat have to do with animal metaphors for the mind? Well I'll tell you, or at least I'll try. Jonathon Haidt often complains about machine metaphors for the mind. There are a number of them that are empirically very bad he thinks. The mind is a general purpose computer. Haidt would prefer to think of a whole horse. Let me give you a different reason to prefer a horse to say, an automobile. Oh, if you were only a horse. I'm not an expert on psychology as I've said. I'd like to be one, but I do consider myself a competent amateur historian of cartoons and comics and here's one I found from 1909. When the automobile was a new thing, newly competitive with horses, Henry Ford's Model T, the first popular, mass-produced car only came out a year before in 1908. Anyway, one of the great things about horses besides the fact that they won't stupidly jump to their deaths into canyons is this. If something does go wrong, you can blame the horse, because it's kind of a low grade kind of person in case of accidents. It's nice to have something subhuman but feeling that you can whip, to take the blame. Not the funniest one panel gag ever. It would be funnier if the writer played up the dark side of it. The wish that there should be bad people or sub people, so you can be better than them. And make you suffer for their badness which is really your own badness that you're trying to project off on to them. It's rather a dark picture if you think of it that way. What dark place am I going to with this? Historically, domestic animals are associated with slavery. Not because domestic animals are slaves, rather because slaves are slotted in conceptually as one kind of domesticated animal. Dehumanization is a big part of the enslaving process. The Greek word for the slave that were take in war was [UNKNOWN], man-footed animal. When Aristotle describes natural slaves it sounds a lot like an idealized domestic animal. That is, there's a kind of wishfulness that there could be a subgroup of humans that would conveniently exhibit the sorts of traits that make for good domestic animals: docile, devoted, dependent, hard-working but otherwise child-like. In light of this, let me take you through a kind of a funny thought process, funny strange, not funny. Funny ha ha, a modern American can say, I'm a dog too, because, why not? What does it really cost a dog lover to say, I'm a dog too? But for an ancient Greek to say that, especially an aristocrat would produce socially unwelcome implications. Having lowered some humans to the level of dogs or cattle in a moral or social sense. You can hardly raise up dog's and cattle's to our level or higher with out lowering yourself to the level of the lowest humans or even lower. I don't want to exaggerate this. Plato says the horse on the right is noble. He is not adverse to admiring a noble beast. The Greek's didn't hate animals just because they owned slaves. I'm not saying that, but it would be very hard for Plato or any free Athenian. Good citizen and true, to say that what is highest and most noble in humans is a function of the animal in us. Because that would sound too much like saying slaves are higher spiritually than citizens. [BLANK_AUDIO] Having determined that reason should rule, ideally, I think Plato's social attitudes would tend to nudge him in the following direction. We've gotta have, not just rule of reason but rule of reasoning people. We've gotta have a natural aristocracy to go with whatever the proper rule is so it must be possible to have irrational people. A distinct and superior class of person and what is good and highest has to flow down from those people. That's the proper aristocratic vision of society [UNKNOWN] reason not only guides in a nominal normative sense, but it is in some sense the well spring of good. This isn't really a plausible view, but I rather suspect that Plato's native attachment. Two aristocratic models of social hierarchy make it hard for him to not end up in this rather dubious conceptual space. All this is a bit hard on Plato. Well, why not? He gets so much credit, I've given it to him, I don't begrudge it. He deserves it and you know what? He gets a lot of stuff right. There are no slaves in his republic, even though there are in his other republic or his other utopia, the laws. Women are equal to men in the Republic. Rationalism made Plato very admirably egalitarian and critical of existing institutions in a lot of ways. I say that's good but he also gets the blame for some of the bits that he didn't get right. I think. In the last video, the previous video, I griped a lot about heights elated confession of utilitarianism how unclear but I still like heights picture of our elephant rising. I think there are something obviously right and true about this picture of human life. Life s semi incompetent rider on the back of a mostly competent even intermittently. Transcendent beast, without whom we could hardly get along I think Plato wouldn't like it. He wouldn't want such a thing to be right. Probably in part because of his aristocratic social backgrounds and attitudes. So much the worse for those attitudes, I'd say. All this is highly speculative as well as frankly opinionated. You don't like my picture of Plato, don't buy it. But I thought I would say a bit more about slavery because, well, I talked about it a bit in connection with Neno remember? Today I think we all know that slavery is wrong. I think we do. But Aristotle was pretty smart and he actually wrote a full defense of it. So what gives? How do you think about a thing like that? A moral revolution like that. I'll talk about it some more. For now, I'm going to move on to Joshua Greene.
