Five days a week, during my daily commute, I have an encounter with social justice. On my return home from work, passing by the Dronacharya metro station in Gurgaon, I take a rightwards u-turn before Arjangarh station to get onto a road Gurgaon’s residents know as ‘pahaadi-road.’ At the u-turn, without a signal to regulate the flow of oncoming traffic, an interesting phenomenon plays out at rush hour. Cars from my side of the road have to go on straight, taking MG Road, or take the u-turn to get onto pahaadi road. The recommended thing for the latter to do is keep to the rightmost, and take a tight u-turn that does allows the oncoming traffic to continue onwards in the farther lanes.
But if you know Gurgaon’s rush hours, you know that the rightmost lane is doomed to move most slowly. So some geniuses stay on the second or third lanes- the ones meant for cars going on straight. One has to assume that they think the sops in the rightmost lane did not have this bright idea. As these deviants slow down to take the u-turn, they hold up the traffic intending to go straight. And in executing the turn they must merge into traffic going in the other direction, so they cut off the cars in the original rightmost lane- the ones doing it properly. In my early Gurgaon years, I was one of the sops in the rightmost lane, trying to do things right. Being cut off by someone taking the u-turn from my left was one of the most infuriating things ever, and I seethed silently at the injustice of a deviant driver getting his or her way. So I developed a method of delivering justice on the streets. Now I keep my car in the second lane, but I don’t cut off the car in the rightmost. Instead, I take a deliberately drawn out u-turn, patiently waiting for oncoming traffic to slow down. This way I ensure that the car in the third lane has to wait for me to complete my turn, and my wide radius allows the rightmost car to take the tight, inner turn before me and proceed uninterrupted. I feel good inflicting my own brand of justice on the lawless streets of Haryana. Of course, I also feel that my brand of justice is the correct brand of justice.
We all possess these internal compasses for what is right and what is wrong, and a deep sense for justice. No one likes deviants getting away with their deviancy, and seeing reward for those who act right in our consideration reinforces our own compliance. There is much evidence that a framework for justice and equity exists in other primates as well. In 2003, Sarah Brosnan and Frans Waal conducted an experiment with five capuchin monkeys, for which one can find videos on YouTube. In the experiment, the monkeys are encouraged to ‘trade’ with their human experimenters. When a monkey hands a lab worker a rock and is returned with a cucumber, she appears content with the transaction. If she witnesses the same trade take place between another monkey and the human experimenter- a cucumber for a rock- she has no problems with it and will continue trading in similar fashion. But if the second monkey is instead given a grape for a rock (a sweeter edible that capuchins value more), the first monkey goes visibly berserk, rattling the walls of her cage in protest.
The experiment shows that, like us, capuchin monkeys possess inequity aversion. Like us, they are averse to, or tend to avoid situations of social inequality or injustice. In species built around social groups, like monkeys, chimpanzees and homo sapiens, the trait for co-operation and altruism evolved because members of the species could unite their efforts for shared success. But if this sharing was unfair, which meant that an individual member of a species was likely to get lower than her deserved share, then co-operating with such a group was to her evolutionary disadvantage. As the preference for altruism and co-operation strengthened in our evolutionary line, so did the aversion for inequity and injustice. But while we’re all hardwired with a sense for justice, right and wrong, we cannot always seem to agree on what in particular is right and wrong. We generally believe that while science can describe things to us, it cannot tell us how we ought to conduct ourselves. This is understood by distinguishing between positive and normative statements. A positive statement makes a factually verifiable comment, such as ‘an average of ten percent human beings are homosexual.’ A normative statement offers a value judgement, such as ‘homosexuality is an unnatural offence.’ It is commonly thought that science can and should only make positive statements.
This is why we do not allow science to comment upon the Cultural Universe. It is not allowed to say that one culture is objectively better than the other, or that a certain cultural practice is bad for its adherents. These realms are largely left to religion and tradition. This is why some people take offence when one condemns practices of female genital mutilation, prevalent in communities across the globe. It’s why many are uncomfortable criticising this or that religion in particular, thinking that we cannot comment upon the morality of another. It’s also why parents are permitted to indoctrinate their children in whatever ideology they seem fit. In his book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris argues that like cholera is cholera anywhere, like cancer is cancer anywhere, so is compassion still compassion and well-being still well-being anywhere. Thus, these are states that science can and should comment upon.
“Well, if it’s their culture.”
“Who are you to decide what’s right and what’s wrong?”
“Look, it’s their religious belief. You cannot offend it.”
There are many variations of the line of argument represented in the questions above. This line would have us believe that morality is subjective. It mandates that a writer place this section in a chapter on the cultural universe, not in the ones dealing with science. We follow this dictum in this journey not because it is right, but because most of us still think it is right. Morality can be and increasingly is approached scientifically, which is another way of saying that it can be approached through reason, observation and experience.
Tolerance and Tribalism
The 21st century was heralded by one of those moments for which we could ask, do you remember what you were doing at that point, and most people would answer in the affirmative. On September 11, 2001, two airplanes were flown into the most iconic symbols of the free world. In the aftermath, then US President George Bush declared on live television- ‘you’re either with us, or against us.’
In doing so, Bush invoked one of the most ancient and enduring features of human psychology- us vs. them. This mental state has come to us from our ape predecessors. We see such behaviour in chimpanzees and gorillas as well, not to mention in a whole host of other animals. Wherever a species lives in social groups, it inevitably develops an in-group vs. out-group consciousness for members of its own species. The most notable examples of this come from Jane Godall’s observation of chimpanzee groups in the 1980s. She documented two tribes of chimpanzees with mutually exclusive territories, and the chimp member of any one tribe ventured into the territory of the other only at his or her own risk. On occasions when these intrepid chimps were spotted by the other tribe, the result was almost always brutal maulings and eventually death.
We can imagine early homo sapiens to be not too different, and we did indeed indulge in violent xenophobia that resulted in, if not outright extinction of, then at least severe losses to Neanderthal and other human populations. But as Yuval Noah Harari tells us, human groupism is a vast order of magnitude dissimilar from the groupism displayed by others species. This is because we are unique in our ability to believe, in large and ever growing numbers, in things that are not necessarily true. Harari helps us picture an ancient battle between homo sapiens and Neanderthals for control over the resources of a valley. The Neanderthals, stronger, hardier and with larger brains, could all gather together only in interest of the valley’s resources. There would be, presumably, nothing else to motivate them for this battle. We say presumably because we currently do not think that other human species developed the cognitive and cultural traits of our own species. But homo sapiens could believe that the Neanderthals are the forces of evil, and that they themselves are messengers of the one true and pure creator. This ability would strengthen homo sapiens in ways that give them competitive advantage over the Neanderthals.
This case applies for differentiation between homo sapiens and chimpanzees as well. No chimpanzee band attacks another because the latter is vermin scum and an offense to god. This is something only homo sapiens are capable of. In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond compiles a list of known genocidal acts throughout history, and in The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker gives us a detailed account of the death tolls racked up by humans against humans. Even a cursory reading of such lists tells us how human groupism manifests in brutal and gruesome ways.