AFTERWORD to "A WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS"

Everything is temporary, nothing is permanent, not even ideas, alas, especially ideas.

In the 1970s, psychologist B. F. Skinner expressed the belief that all problems facing this beautiful planet (famine, disease, wars, and the threat of nuclear holocaust) could be solved in his school of behaviorism.

Like his pigeons, which he trained to do his bidding, he saw human beings as autonomous agents or biological organisms that could be controlled by responding to external stimuli and modified by their environment. His theory, known as Operant Conditioning, spread across the land into every school curriculum and workplace. Ironically, it still has a life in our handheld electronic gadgets.

That said it has been largely abandoned in the classroom as we are now into neuroscience which claims to be able to illuminate the distinct pathways taken to our thoughts and judgments.

The fascination for this new theory is quite compelling as fMRI technology analyze people's brains in the interest of determining how the brain works and the nature of our moral decision-making.

Fast forward on this enthralling track is evolutionary psychology and its interest in tracing how primitive human beings encountered and dealt with physical danger, and how that mindset has evolved to dealing with psychological perils today with the same set of possibilities with this reactive equipment.

While religion has been caught napping, psychology has entered the vacated space looking at people's adaptive and maladaptive behavior while inching its way to a philosophical theory of morality. 

Just as we have had the positive thinking of Norman Vincent Peale and possibility thinking of Robert H. Schuller from the church pulpit, we now have positive psychology from Martin Seligman and others from the couch.

Psychologist Jonathan Hadith (born 1963), one of the positive psychology pioneers, is into the primitive reptilian brain and its intuitive construction. He sees reason has no part in moral judgment but comes into play, after the fact, to justify our intuitions that are quickly and unreflectively formed. 

This idea has something in common with The Fisher Paradigm©™ (see book of that title, 2020).  Haidt's work is however considered scientific while this paradigm makes no such claims as it is empirical, experiential and intuitive.

Whereas I have created an intuitive typology of personality, demographic, and geographic profiles of people as persons, Hadith has developed a moral system for people in general with six pairs of moral intuitions: care vs. harm; fairness vs. cheating; loyalty vs. betrayal; authority vs. subversion; sanctity vs. degradation; and liberty vs. oppression.

If this sounds a little like horse sense, it is because the soft sciences deal inscrutably with the obvious in a quest to penetrate and predict man's social nature and behavioral proclivities.

Hadith’s typology endeavors to capture our intuition’s flawed affect that seems to take precedence over rational purposeful modes of conduct.

The Fisher Paradigm©™ takes a totally different approach to expose the folly of our conscious strutting and repressive reliance on our reptilian brain.

But like theology before modern psychology, our uncertainty and ambivalent nature is clashing with multiple cultures while racing towards homogeneity.  Consequently, attempts to make sense of all this are often left with post ad-hoc explanations.

In a word, given the fallacy of the belief that because one event follows another that the first event must have been the cause of the second is seldom the case as invariably other factors intervene.

Biology is not morality, but behavior is dependent on biology, as we behave in terms of the integrative forces of personality, geography and demographics in response to cultural imperatives that impact our sense of identity and our take on morality.

We have not departed too far from our ancient primitive ancestors who viewed a situation in terms of fight, flight, adapt or submit in an effort to survive.  Then as now, the reptilian brain was employed in the decision-making but largely unconsciously and intuitively as instinct became the integrative response to the circumstances. 

Assuming that biology has equipped us with the rudimentary capacity to develop morality and empathy, it would appear that psychologists as practitioners of this art form are limited to a descriptive discipline being otherwise confined to explanations of what is morally right or wrong, not unlike religion, but still unable to determine much less predict behavior.  

We can take some comfort in the fact that -- The poetry of Goethe and Byron, the philosophy of Rousseau, the poetry and novels of Shelley, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, while easing the anxiety of our mortality, fail to present a clear set of ideas when it comes to shaping our movements into the future as fear still remains our most reliable guidance system.

We inch forward as vulnerable man and must accept our status with good humor as do those who pretend to have insight into our plight.