Evil and Plasticity

Evil and Plasticity

It used to be held, with some vehemence, that what is bad or evil in human behavior is derived from our “animal nature”: aggression, uncontrolled sexuality, greed, lack of personal hygiene. We must not give in to our animal tendencies; we must cultivate something called “civilization”. We must “rise above” animal instinct in order to achieve virtue and avoid evil. Religion was supposed to help us perform this feat. We have a bad part and a good part, coinciding with the instinctive and animal as opposed to the civilized and rational. Nowadays this view is less common in enlightened circles: animals are really not that bad (not that animal), so we need not negate our animal self in order to be decent upstanding individuals. What I am going to suggest, on the contrary, is that our evil tendencies belong to our civilized side, specifically our mental plasticity (to use the trendy term). We are evil because we are plastic (flexible, innovative, intellectually free; the OED gives “easily shaped or molded”). We are not wholly governed by our genes; we can learn, change, and adapt. Thus it is that we can become victims of propaganda, conspiracy theories, political ideologies, cults, and sheer nonsense. Our instincts tie us to the tried and true; our plastic minds enable us to be shaped by the new, the false, the wacky. What leads to evil, especially the political kind, is credulity and susceptibility to fantasy—our excessive “intelligence”. Animals don’t believe conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and crazy cults; they stick to the basic facts of life. But we humans, because of our mental plasticity, succumb to the wildest ideas, and proceed to act on them. Genocides are fueled by ingenious falsehoods and sophistical rhetoric—they thrive on human receptivity. We are not commendably closed-minded like animals; we are culpably open-minded. We stand apart from animals cognitively, and this makes us stand apart from them morally; we are capable of far worse than them. Our thoughts are creative, labile, nimble; and they interact with our emotions to produce vicious attitudes and actions. Evil is the result of cognitive flexibility and emotional manipulation (try manipulating the emotions of a cat or tortoise!). We are evil because we are not genetically hardwired—because we are (partly) blank slates. We are all too suggestible, impressionable, pliable. The cost of our great intellectual and artistic achievements is a proneness to political evil (I am not talking about simple theft and the like). We are too educable, too ready to absorb what we are told. Our minds are like ordinary plastic: warm it up a bit and it is putty in people’s hands (including our own). Plasticity leads to persuasion. Have you noticed that animals are never stupid in the way humans are? They don’t have the necessary plasticity. But humans can believe the stupidest things at the drop of a hat, because they are easily mentally molded. We are stupid because we are clever—quick learners. It isn’t fixed animal instinct but openness to influence that makes us capable of evil.

But why are we so plastic? What makes this possible? I believe the chief culprit is language, because language changed the fundamental dynamics of the human mind. First, we have to be able to learn our spoken language—a prodigious feat of elastic knowledge acquisition. We do it as children—the time we are at our most mentally shapeable (it’s just formless goo in there).[1] Whatever the language is, we absorb it without difficulty (some humans can even speak Finnish). But second, the language capacity is itself massively plastic; it is capable of amazing feats of unbounded creativity. We don’t just say what our genes tell us to (as with non-human “languages”); we construct indefinitely many novel sentences and understand them perfectly. We are that plastic—that creative, unconstrained. Our minds team with linguistic possibilities. Just think of the cognitive revolution this must have required: not just plodding re-enactments of ancient genetic instructions but brand new mental and physical performances. The mind came to have enormous creative potential; it could assume infinitely many internal configurations. Speech represents unlimited cognitive plasticity; it isn’t just a limited series of pre-programmed noises. Language requires cognitive elasticity on a grand scale; it is what lifted the mind to a high level of processing capacity. Thus: we are plastic because we speak; and we are evil because we are plastic; therefore, we are evil because we speak. Evil of the political-religious kind is an offshoot of the evolution of language. The freedom inherent in language is what leads to the freedom inherent in evil—the ability to conjure persecutory ideologies. Animals don’t have this kind of mental freedom because they don’t speak, but we speak and in consequence have the mental machinery to generate evil world-views. I speak; therefore, I am (capable of) evil. Of course, other factors come into play, particularly affective, but the basic enabling mental machinery is derived from our linguistic capacities. Animals have neither, so they remain essentially gene-controlled, i.e., instinct-bound. The creative evil of Iago, say, is bound up with his verbal ingenuity: he could not be so evil without it.[2] The holocaust would not be possible without the persuasive and creative powers of language: it must be possible for minds to be shaped by linguistic inputs that trade on their plasticity. And the more fanciful the better: for the human mind can accept virtually any degree of absurdity (language has absurdity built into it). Sense and nonsense go together. If humans had never developed language, the cognitive pre-conditions of political evil would not be satisfied. Fascism presupposes cognitive plasticity. Fascism isn’t an instinct that exists without benefit of language; it is made possible by language. An unforeseen side-effect, no doubt, but then evolution has never been good at anticipating undesirable side-effects. Sense perception alone could never produce it, even conjoined with memory and emotion, because perception is not plastic; it is reflexive and instinctual, stimulus-bound. Evil acts come from evil thoughts; and evil thoughts arise because the mind is flexible enough to entertain them. The hypothesis, then, is that this flexibility owes its origin to language—that which most clearly distinguishes us from other animals. Not the grammar of language, to be sure, but its high degree of plastic variation—all those languages, all those sentences. These are not written into the genes and are not present by instinct; they issue from a remarkably flexible capacity coupled with great powers of learning and productivity. Evil arises not from our animalistic side but from our intellectual-linguistic human side.[3]

[1] I am not here endorsing a blank slate model of the language capacity—I don’t doubt that the grammar of human languages is innately specified. I am making the obvious point that the particular language a child learns is not innately given; this is what requires cognitive plasticity. Similarly, novel utterances depend on prior fixed rules, but which utterances are produced is not antecedently given—it is “free”. Spoken language is really a combination of the fixed and innate, on the one hand, and the free and acquired, on the other: stiff, inelastic, and rigid versus soft, elastic, and bendable.

[2] I talk about Iago and the evil character in general in my Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (1997).

[3] The cure for evil is not then suppression or repression of instincts but education of the intellect (the “soul”). The mind has to be trained to curb its enthusiasm—critical thinking, in a word. This is actually an optimistic view, because instincts are hard to control but the mind is susceptible to re-education; thus, the mind’s plasticity can be used to cure the ill effects of that plasticity. This isn’t easy, but it can in principle be done.