Rat Feel Peer Pressure Too
This news article at the website of New Scientist magazine, Rats feel peer pressure too, tells us:
It’s not just humans who succumb to peer pressure - rats do too. Brown rats have a tendency to disregard personal experiences and copy the behaviour of their peers. What’s more, the urge to conform appears to be so strong that they will choose to eat food they know to be unpalatable when interacting with other rats that have done the same.
The article ends with this interesting question:
The big question now, he says, is why they conform. “It’s not immediately obvious why a rat or chimp or human would cast aside what it knows from its own experience and adopt an inferior course of action just because everybody else is doing it.”
At the risk of straying into a sort of story labeled as ‘just-so’ by the very important mental sanitary engineers of evolutionary biology (such as George Williams), I’ll speculate. Social bonds provide a huge advantage under the conditions which have prevailed during the recent evolutionary eons. Social mammals often have intricate habits to help the entire community to find and share food, to set up watches for that leopard slinking through the shadows, to help raise the young in the communities, and so forth.
Acting in concert would have generally provided advantages far outweighing the risk of the community following a member who was a little nutty or just mistaken so that he had picked up a dangerous habit. A strong-willed madman or idiot would provide a great danger for the human race so long as he was attractive enough, in some sense (but Hitler?), that he gain some initial attention while going about his lunatic ways. He might even provide a way of behavior in which seeming normality would cover up moral insanity, allowing the vast majority of members of his society to carry out evil projects while going about their ordinary affairs, taking care of their children and paying taxes and other bills and so on. This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany, colonizing European powers, and even the Soviet Union according to the historical researches and analyzes of Hannah Arendt. (I say even the Soviet Union because everyone there, even the useful bureaucrats were subject to arbitrary persecution or enslavement in Siberia leading to conscious awareness of the evil being done because you might be the next victim.) Robert McNamara has made a similar claim about the Washington functionaries who managed the Vietnam War. With great power comes great responsibility. A modern technological society has great power to feed great masses of human beings or to blast them to kingdom come. A mass society, and modern technological societies are such, can provide for a constant onslaught of peer pressure. Raise children in front of the television. Raise them on brand names and tales of celebrities. Send them to schools organized in age-group cohorts just to make sure they don’t get the mistaken idea that their job is to learn — no, it’s to socialize and to learn how to like what everyone else likes. Thus it is that bureaucratic institutions and corporate products are always with us, allowing each worker to keep his nose to the grindstone and ignore the results of his efforts, allowing each consumer to simply transact as often as possible in his favorite marketplace. Hitlers have only a few years to do their work but the nice middle-class bureaucrats will always be with us.
Let me be personal for a minute. When I was young, I liked some television, but very little. A John Wayne movie on Saturday night was great. The Flinstones were okay on Friday and I tried to watch Bullwinkle and Rocky on Sunday mornings and Bugs Bunny cartoons at various times. The last two cartoon shows demanded much higher levels of cultural knowledge and reasoning from their viewers than any adult shows on at the time. At any rate, I was far from allergic to television but I didn’t see the point of watching Leave it to Beaver when there were so many good books to read and so many jigsaw puzzles to solve or even re-solve. Then I learned in fifth grade and sixth grade that I wasn’t going to be part of the American conversation if I didn’t watch The Monkees and then Laugh-in and then ad nauseum. Soon enough, I began to offer myself up, allowing myself to become more digestable to the gods of the marketplaces.
At the same time, I was being trained in school to sit in class as the teacher went over and over material I’d already known before the first time. I’d been taught to read at the age of 3 by my Scottish Aunt Minnie and I didn’t slow down until informal peer pressure pushed me towards time-wasting trash like The Monkees and also trained me to be lazy. I’ve always had a problem with peer pressure — I failed to resist heavy drinking in college and in the corporate nomadic world — and maybe I would have had a problem with a lack of backbone anyway. But I sure didn’t get any help in exercising my moral integrity from the schools or my church or even my family. To be sure, I had my hardworking parents and some other beloved adults as good examples but I learned some lessons from those examples and many from the public schools and many from the anti-intellectual trends in American entertainment. In fact, not seeing my parents actually working at the machine-shop and the hospital, I had little idea for years that they were working any harder than I was, snoozing in my classrooms.
Through lack of an inborn toughness and lack of proper formation, I had become just another head of cattle following the ass in front of me, so to speak. I wasn’t happy about the situation and wasn’t enjoying myself but I’d try a little harder every so often because those around me seemed to enjoy movies as they declined in quality and creativity, television as it remained television, sports as it became central to the American consciousness, constant movement through stores and malls. I tried. I honestly tried, wasting my opportunity to develop my mind and become a theoretical physicist as I’d wanted to become since I could recognize Einstein’s face in pictures. I honestly tried, giving up my own pleasures and my own preferred ways of spending my time, even giving up my dead-time. That last was dangerous and had to be unlearned. Somewhere, Jacques Barzun points out, speaking of creative thinkers, that the achievers are those who know how to loaf. In modern society, we’re only to give the illusion of loafing as we sit in front of the television or stereo, or perhaps in Yankee Stadium, letting someone fill our eyes and our heads with profitable trash.
Because of human intelligence, human societies can be terribly dangerous organisms, to the point of evil. Because of higher possibilities of human intelligence, many of the worst dangers can be averted or at least moderated. Those higher possibilities allow us to do what rats or chimpanzees can’t do: to evaluate the dangers to our own moral integrity or that of our children and to properly educate and train ourselves and our children to deal with the dangers. The first step in overcoming inappropriate peer pressure which can deform our moral natures is actually something simple and something very Thomistic, if I may say so.
We first need to pay attention rather than always acting reflexively or acting to move with the flow. If we pay attention, we can think about how to change our behaviors and our ways of seeing and thinking. If we pay attention, we can move towards true human personhood, achieving some sort of self-aware moral integrity. How do we do this?
The second step in overcoming inappropriate peer pressure is simply to decide to do what you think is right, one step at a time, and worry about the practical consequences afterwards. This is the big issue from a more general level. If you wish to be a moral creature, then you act morally, by effort when training yourself and as a natural matter once you’ve done that. You do what is right. If you think first of the practical consequences and order your options accordingly, then you’re not a moral creature but rather a utilitarian creature. This is not to say it’s morally proper to ignore practical considerations, especially the damage our moral actions might have on others. It is to say that we have to first order our possible behaviors by moral criteria and then consider whether, for example, our children might suffer greatly if we accept martyrdom even if the price we pay ends up to be no more than the loss of public respectability or prosperity or both.
Pay attention and put moral concerns first, concentrate on your next step. Make your long-term goals but realize you have to move towards them one step at a time. By the time you reach a goal, you might find it to be different than you had imagined, different from what you’d planned upon. And you might find yourself frighteningly alone. You might find that some of those decent folk who are far better behaved than you have redefined morality in the terms used by those nice, middle-class German bureaucrats of Nazi Germany or their spiritual brothers in Washington, DC during the 60s and 70s. To them, moral integrity is the behavior that secures prosperity and protects our property rights. Thus it is that we’re upset with street crime but okay with dropping bombs on civilians in Hiroshima or Munich or in the villages on the borders of Cambodia and Vietnam. Why bother mentioning Baghdad or aspirin factories in Africa?
But this entire process of gaining the proper sort of moral independence is short-circuited too easily by peer pressure and we Christians should be insightful enough to realize that modern societies feed our worst sorts of social instincts. I was very lucky in some ways when I was young, but one of the most important was my attraction to the idealized biographies of famous men and women which my local library had on the shelves on the children’s floor. To be sure, a smaltzy story of Thomas Jefferson bringing ham and bread to a slave who’d run away from the family plantation wasn’t the last word on his complex and confused relationship to slaves and slavery but it’s still the best introduction to an important man. What’s wrong with a whitewashing that teaches moral lessons? Isn’t it enough to read a more complete life of Jefferson as a teenager or adult? Those stories glorifying some sort of moral integrity sat in the back of my mind all those years I was trying so hard to be a mainstream American.
Maybe those stories played a major part in my eventual attempts to recover my moral integrity.
