“The frank abolition of all distances brings no nearness… Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness.”

(Heidegger, 1971, pp. 165, 166)

Heidegger’s remark seems to call attention to the fact that technology’s much celebrated victory over distance fails to deliver everything it promised. While technology might be able to facilitate our drawing near to things once considered far, much more than technology is required to bridge the existential gap between the knower and the known. Distancelessness, in other words, is not the same as nearness. Hours of watching television or surfing the internet might increase our knowledge about the object of our attention, but might not necessarily result in a feeling of being closer to it. In fact, the whole experience might result in an increased feeling of alienation from the object and from the ‘real’ world, as we consciously or subconsciously realize that our efforts have failed to produce meaningful nearness. And yet, contrary to Heidegger’s assertion, some kind of crossing of distances must bring nearness, if the words ‘far’ and ‘near’ are to have any meaning at all! Is it that the distances that technology helps us traverse are of little consequence in existential terms, or that we have not yet fully understood what it is that technology brings near or pushes far, and how this shapes our relationship with the world? This essay constitutes an attempt to shed some light on the issue of how technology is changing our ideas about distance. My argument rests on the proposition that we need to start thinking of distance in more sophisticated ways than the traditional temporal/spatial approach, and that we also need to realize that some kinds of distances, paradoxically, are necessary in the production of nearness.

Before modern communication technologies, this distance was defined basically in Euclidean terms, since the opportunities for communicating with others were completely determined by temporal/spatial distance. As Borgmann (2000) suggests:

In a premodern setting, what is present in space and time has prominence since a resort to elsewhere and elsewhen is slow or laborious. To the prominence of presence corresponds a focal area of nearness that is centered on my body. Within the circle of proximity, things and persons present themselves in their own right and are known directly, by acquaintance rather than description. Objects that are remote in time and space, however, I know indirectly, by having information about them… In this way a substantive metric of nearness and farness underlies or is inscribed on the formal metric of Euclidean space… The substance of farness lies in the reference of signs to things and persons that are concealed by distance in space and remoteness in time. (p. 95-96)

It is not my intention to provide here a detailed analysis of everything that happened in the move from such a setting to our current times. Suffice it to say, again in the words of Borgmann, that “Information technology in particular does not so much bring near what is far as it cancels the metric of time and space” (2000, p. 98). The so-called ‘death of distance’ means that suddenly the remoteness of objects is no impediment to accessing them in some mediated way. But this new ordering of distance affects not only what is far, but also what is near. In contrast with the premodern setting, where communication with the near was convenient and communication with the far was difficult, modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) make it largely irrelevant whether we are communicating with someone down the hall or halfway across the planet, and whether we are doing so synchronously or asynchronously in one case or the other.

But while the metric of space and time may have become somewhat redundant, I wouldn’t go as far as proclaiming its annihilation. Not only does it continue to play an important part in our experience of the world, but more to the point of my argument, its rules continue to largely influence how we associate value judgments with distance. For instance, many critiques of modern technology hinge on the argument that an increase in mediation automatically results in a lamentable decrease in the quality of communication; in other words, the more mediation that is required in the act of communication, the worse the interaction is deemed to be. This kind of judgment carries with it, implicitly, a bias towards face-to-face communication as the prime model for communication. Consequently, these critiques tend to approach the question from the perspective of what we lose in mediated communication compared to face-to-face communication, not of what we gain that face-to-face communication is unable to provide. In other words, an IM chat with someone hundreds of miles away is critiqued from the perspective of how much richer that conversation would be face-to-face, not from the perspective of how impossible that conversation would be without IM. More nuanced critiques might concede that the benefits of an IM conversation in circumstances where face-to-face communication is an impossibility outweigh the detriments. But these same critiques would still condemn an IM conversation carried on with someone in the next cubicle, in light of the possibility of having that same conversation face-to-face (I myself have presented such arguments on occasion). Are there really no circumstances under which we could argue that having an IM chat with someone in the next cubicle is preferable to having a face-to-face conversation? It is as if the discussion of the affordances (what the technology makes possible, and what it makes impossible) of any technology that mediates communication must begin from the position that any deviation from face-to-face communication already entails a loss. The propensity to see things this way is, as I will explore more fully below, a remnant from the days when indeed communication with the far implied an increase in mediation, and this increase in mediation resulted in a decrease in the quality of communication. Today, this bias against mediation serves as a way to express the anxiety we feel as we find the Euclidean logic behind our traditional understanding of distance undermined by ICTs.

However, my project is not simply to recommend that we learn to accept the annihilation of the metric of time and space and move on with our lives. Distancelessness, as Heidegger suggests, is not the same as nearness. The concept of distance continues to be useful, I think, as a way to measure the existential nearness between us and what we seek to know. When seen as a moment, not as a permanent state, distance can help us to take stock of our position in relation to where we want to be. This fits nicely with my interest in normative theorizings of technology, in arguments for the use of technology to increase our understanding of the world, ontologically reintegrating ourselves into it, to use an image by H.S. Bhola (1992) that I am fond of paraphrasing. In order to do this, I am proposing that apart from temporal/spatial distance, we need to consider epistemological distance and ontological distance.

The tyranny of temporal/spatial nearness

Before I get into the details of what I mean by epistemological and ontological distance, I would like to delve deeper into the question of how, despite the redundancy of the metric of time and space brought about by ICTs, certain manifestations of temporal/spatial distance continue to influence how we think about nearness in an online setting. I call this the temporal/spatial bias.

The temporal/spatial bias is just what its name suggests: a set of assumptions (based on our experience of time and space) that influences how we construct meaning about nearness and farness. I am interested in how these assumptions inform value judgments about online technologies. My observation is that, despite the supposed annihilation of the time and space metric in online communication, temporal/spatial distance continues to be used instinctively as a benchmark when describing distances in the online world. This is particularly the case in normative assessments of online experiences, when we are trying to argue that the distance that mediation introduces between the knower and the known is detrimental. As I illustrated above, some arguments propose that any kind of face-to-face communication is better than any kind of online communication because it is immediate and synchronous. The implication, based on traditional temporal/spatial assumptions, is that farness translates into an increase in mediation (the farther the object, the more mediation is required), which in turn results in more impurities introduced into the process. In other words, the use of any instrument to mediate communication is seen as a lesser form of perception than what can be experienced directly by the body, because in some way or another this mediation constitutes a decrease in the quality or amount of data that could be gained through one’s senses.

I am not arguing that the outcome of replacing direct interaction with mediated interaction is something that should not be analyzed and, when appropriate, critiqued. I wish instead to point out how the idea of temporal/spatial farness is used to critique the quality of mediated experiences even when those experiences represent the only opportunity for interaction, or when the knowledge that can be derived from those experiences is something that could not be acquired through any other means.

I would like to use two simple metaphors to make the point that direct experience is not always better than mediated experience. First, consider the use of a mirror to look at the reflection of our face. Obviously, the use of this instrument constitutes a form of mediation, since given our anatomies it is impossible to focus our eyesight on our own face. Without the mirror’s mediation we would have no first-hand knowledge of our own countenance. While it is true that not all knowledge about ourselves comes from our reflected image, the specific knowledge of how we look to others can only be gained through representation. Second, consider the act of star gazing. Not only is the knowledge derived from celestial observation greatly delayed temporally (to the extent that some of the stars we look upon may not even exist anymore), but the spatial distance reduces information emanating from gigantic suns to tiny points of light. And yet, this limited, mediated information has proved incredibly useful for various purposes including navigation, calendar calculation, scientific and religious construction of theories about the nature of the universe, etc.

In presenting these two simplistic examples, I wish to point out that mediated perception, while different from unmediated perception, can provide kinds of knowledge not available through the latter. This lesson can be transposed to our analysis of online experiences. While we need to be mindful of the advantages of face-to-face communication, we also need to acknowledge the kind of insights (about ourselves, about our world) that can be gained through online experiences that cannot be gained through unmediated perception. Categorical denunciations of virtuality only serve to reify the idea of cyberspace as an alternate, autonomous reality, not as a new part of reality that must be integrated and balanced with the other parts. As Wilson argues, the function of our most important technologies is not (or at least should not be) “to replace the natural world, but to display it” (p. 2000, p. 69). Likewise, the function of communication technologies is not to replace the richness that temporal/spatial nearness affords, but to facilitate communication that temporal/spatial distance would make impossible. The fact that this implies a degradation in temporal/spatial nearness is countered by the fact that this kind of communication provides new knowledge and new dimensions of being; in other words, new opportunities for nearness of a different sort.

Epistemological distance

What am I trying to imply by saying that things can be epistemologically near or far? This conceptualization of distance has to do with the degree to which I can justify my knowledge of something based on my current assumptions. One thing is epistemologically nearer than another when my knowledge of the former is relatively more justified (to me, at least) than my knowledge of the latter.

The interesting thing is that the temporal/spatial bias would suggest that things are epistemologically near when they are near in terms of the space and time metric, when in fact (because of the ‘annihilation’ of this metric) this is no longer necessarily the case. To understand how this works, let’s consider the variables of synchronicity and mediation when looked at from the perspective of epistemological distance.

Synchronicity refers to the timeliness of experience; it describes whether experience is immediate or delayed. Because of the temporal/spatial bias, the common belief is that synchronous experiences translate into epistemological nearness (in other words, knowledge about something that is immediate is assumed to be more justified); consequently, asynchronous experiences translate into epistemological farness (that is,  knowledge about something that is delayed is assumed to be less justified). However, because of the abolishment of temporal/spatial distance, what is temporally/spatially near is not necessarily what is epistemologically near; something can be asynchronous or delayed and be epistemologically near (e.g., knowledge gained through an email exchange with someone, whether down the hall or hundreds of miles away, whose ideas are epistemologically congruent with mine), while something can be synchronous or immediate and be epistemologically far (e.g., knowledge gained through a face-to-face conversation with someone whose ideas are epistemologically incongruent with mine). So epistemological distance is a function not of things being synchronous or asynchronous, as the temporal/spatial bias would suggest, but of an altogether different measure: how justified is my knowledge about something.

The same kind of argument can be made about mediation, which I am using here to mean the degree to which an original object is technologically represented, or mediated, in order to be engaged remotely. In other words, mediation describes whether an experience is concrete or represented (actual or virtual, in the common parlance). Because of the temporal/spatial bias, the common belief is that unmediated experiences translate into epistemological nearness (in other words, knowledge about something that is concrete is assumed to be more justified); on the other hand, mediated experiences translate into epistemological farness (that is, knowledge about something that is represented is assumed to be less justified). But again, because of the ‘abolishment’ of temporal/spatial distance, what is temporally/spatially near is not necessarily what is epistemologically near. Something can be mediated or represented and be epistemologically near (e.g., the email exchange in the example above), while something can be unmediated or concrete and be epistemologically far (e.g., the face-to-face conversation in the example above). Again, nearness in this case is a function of how justified I feel my knowledge of something is, not how far or near in temporal/spatial terms it is from me.

According to the logic I just described, knowledge of things in cyberspace might be more justified (to me) than knowledge of things in my own neighborhood. This is not unproblematic. I have warned previously (Mejias, 2004b) of what can happen when what is spatially near becomes irrelevant in comparison to what is, thanks to technology, spatially far but epistemologically near. The argument just presented is not so much a refutation of this as it is an attempt to further explore the dynamic. As Dreyfus (2000) has argued, epistemology (the Cartesian flavor, at least) can be limiting if it positions the subject as detached from the world, the internal mind as separate from the external body and world, the knower as the skeptical, independent entity that must question the reality of the known. In such a scenario, it doesn’t really matter whether epistemological distance is related at all to temporal/spatial distance, and the knower might not care that he or she is embedded in a social world more immediate than the online world; since such view argues that the knower is separate from the world no matter what, things can be spatially near or far without serious consequences to their epistemological availability. Hence the critique of Cartesian epistemology as a way of knowing: “Taking the skeptic seriously and attempting to prove that there is an external world presupposes a separation of the mind from the world of things and other people that defies a phenomenological description of how human beings make sense of everyday things and of themselves” (Dreyfus, 2000, p. 53). Thus, given the need for something to link temporal/spatial and epistemological distance to a more normative notion of nearness (a notion of nearness that specifies how the individual should relate to the world), I turn to a discussion of ontological distance.

Ontological distance

What am I trying to imply by saying that things can be ontologically near or far? While epistemological distance has to do with degrees of knowledge justification, ontological distance has to do with degrees of agency: the ability of subjects to act upon things, to bring things existentially nearer by making them part of their sphere of action. One thing is ontologically nearer than another when I am more capable of interacting with the former than with the latter.

Again, the temporal/spatial bias suggests that things are ontologically near when they are near in terms of time and space, but upon closer examination we can see that this might not be necessarily the case.  We can look at the variables of synchronicity and mediation again and derive similar observations to those we derived for epistemological distance: Whereas the temporal/spatial bias leads us to assume that synchronous and unmediated objects are ontologically nearer, the diminishing primacy of time and space brought about by ICTs confirms that asynchronous and mediated objects can be ontologically near as well. In other words, it is possible for the subject to have a higher degree of agency in relation to something that is remote or mediated as opposed to something that is immediate and unmediated. For instance, my actions can have weightier significance and meaning in an online asynchronous forum than in a face-to-face forum in my neighborhood.

Ontological distance involves an assessment of temporal/spatial distance and epistemological distance. Ontological distance combines our perception of where objects are in time and space with our knowledge about those objects in an effort to figure out what they mean to us, what types of actions are possible. Ontological distance helps us acknowledge that Object X, at a particular temporal/spatial and epistemological position, has a particular meaning, and that certain actions are or are not possible based on that meaning. This search for the relationship between meaning and action, as Dourish (2001) explains, has been the project of phenomenology:

What the phenomenologists have explored is the relationship between embodied action and meaning. For them, the source of meaning (and meaningfulness) is not a collection of abstract, idealized entities; instead, it is to be found in the world in which we act, and which acts upon us. The world is already filled with meaning. Its meaning is to be found in the way in which it reveals itself to us as being available for our actions. It is only through those actions, and the possibility for actions that the world affords us, that we can come to find the world, in both its physical and social manifestations, meaningful. (p. 116)

Ontological distance tracks our uncovering of meaning in the world, and indicates the degree to which this world is available to us for action. A change in ontological distance signifies a change in this availability, and thus a change in meaning: Things that are ontologically far from us are experienced abstractly, offering us little opportunity for involvement; conversely, things that are ontologically near are experienced as part of our sphere of action-things that we can change and that can change us. In this light, Bhola’s (1992) call for the ontological reintegration of the individual to the world can be interpreted as the abolishment of ontological distance by re-inscribing the individual into the world as a full agent, or to paraphrase Freire (1972), by transforming the individual into a subject-not an object-of history. The important point to make here is that while things might be epistemologically nearer than ever (due to the availability of information), and while temporal/spatial distance does not matter as much, they are also more ontologically distanced than ever, in the sense that we are not always fully empowered to act upon them.

This lack of ontological nearness is a phenomenon that I do not intend to address right now. Suffice it to say that it involves power dynamics that include the use of technology (mainly, mass communication technologies) for the specific purpose of creating ontological alienation within oppressed classes. At the same time, however, technology also offers new affordances or possibilities that can bring ontological nearness. For example, technologically facilitated shifts in temporal/spatial distance can, as I have discussed, provide better perspectives or vantage points from which to learn about the world and learn about ourselves-perspectives that would be impossible to acquire without technological mediation. Likewise, shifts in epistemological distance can allow us to reassess the assumptions that justify our knowledge, creating opportunities for critical thinking and the questioning of things as we have assumed them to be. These shifts, if properly channeled, can result in an ontological re-approach or re-integration to the world.

Conclusions

Most critiques against technology’s objectification of the individual and the world revolve around the assumption that we should strive towards temporal/spatial nearness. As I have tried to show in this paper, this bias no longer yields a meaningful model for understanding a world in which ICTs play a major role. Thus, a re-evaluation of what nearness means to us is in order. My argument is that we should strive towards ontological nearness, and take advantage of the unfolding affordances created by ICTs to manipulate temporal/spatial distance and epistemological distance to attain this goal, even if this manipulation entails an increase, not a decrease, in those types of distances.

My point, then, is that nearness can be engendered by distance; or to articulate it in a less paradoxical way: cultivating certain kinds of farness at certain times can eventually lead to more meaningful forms of nearness. As I have argued, distances do not necessarily diminish meaning when they produce information that would otherwise not be available to us, or when they represent steps on the road to increased understanding. Thus, the goal of a pedagogy of nearness (a pedagogy which I plan to define and develop more fully in a later project) is to use temporal/spatial farness to reveal new information, and epistemological farness to challenge our assumptions and justifications. Both distancings can be important tools in the process of figuring out what is our current ontological position vis-à-vis the world, and whether this position is satisfactory to us.

One of the biases I hope my argument can begin to dispel is that a simple, linear progression towards nearness in all of the three distances discussed is the desired goal. The process of understanding and acting upon the world requires moves that are multifaceted and complex, moves that simultaneously require nearness in one type of distance and farness in another. Sometimes a distancing in one axis is required before nearness in another can be achieved, which in turn causes a shift in another axis, and so on. For example, a temporal/spatial distancing from my surroundings can lead me to an epistemological re-assessment of them, which can lead to new ontological approaches to those same surroundings.

What role can technology play in this process? To begin with, we need to abandon previous biases and acknowledge that not all the farness that technology introduces is damaging, as not all the nearness that it engenders is (from an ontological perspective) as helpful as we would like to believe. Ultimately, we need to acknowledge that technology’s power in allowing us to manipulate distances should be placed in the service of a larger goal. This goal requires that we remain conscious of technology’s possibilities as well as its limitations in facilitating ontological nearness. This kind of view of technology (which is itself part of an ontological reintegration to a world in which ICTs are increasingly part of our lives) is what constitutes the difference between “using the real world as a metaphor for interaction and using it as a medium for interaction” (Dourish, 2001, p. 101). In other words, we should not seek to design a virtual world where technology affords a virtual ontological nearness, but we should seek to design technologies that afford ontological nearness to the actual world, even if that nearness is incomplete and must be supplemented by non-technological means.

References

Benjamin, W. (1988). Illuminations. (H. Arendt, ed.), New York: Schocken Books

Bhola, H. S. (1992). Literacy, knowledge, power, and development: Multiple
connections. Springfield, VA: DYNEDRS.

Borgmann, A. (2000). Information, nearness, and farness. In K. Goldberg, (Ed.) The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet. (pp. 90-107). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Dourish, Paul. Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Dreyfus, H. (2000). Telepistemology: Descartes’ last stand. In K. Goldberg (Ed.), The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet.  (pp. 48-63). Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder

Heidegger, Martin; translations and introduction by Albert Hofstadter. Poetry, language, thought. 1st Perennial Classics ed. New York: Perennial Classics, 2001.

Mejias, U. (2004a). Weapons of mass communication. Retrieved January 3, 2005 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2004/05/weapons_of_mass.html

Mejias, U. (2004b). Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis. Retrieved January 3, 2005 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/files/mejias_nearness.pdf

Wilson, C. (2000). Vicariousness and authenticity. In K. Goldberg, (Ed.) The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet. (pp. 64-89). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

This might make instinctive sense. After all, one could argue, aren’t adults better equipped to distinguish moral nuances than children? But careful consideration reveals some problems with this perspective. For example, does cognitive structuralism’s approach to moral development imply that organisms with higher reasoning skills are more capable of moral behavior than organisms with lower reasoning skills? Or to put it in more crass terms: Are smarter people more moral than their counterparts? Do humans behave more morally than jellyfish?

Gilligan (1977), among others, has presented a critique of this approach by contrasting Kohlberg’s idea of the moral subject as an individual who can think formally and act autonomously with a model of the moral subject as someone who thinks contextually and acts socially. Similarly, Hoffman (2002) tries to elucidate the difference between these two perspectives by contrasting morality as justice versus morality as caring. And Dreyfus (1990) argues that intellectualism is of little use to an ethical expert who responds “instinctively and appropriately to each ethical situation” (p. 11; more on this to follow).

In this paper, however, I want to present a different type of critique to the cognitive structuralist view of moral development by making two claims: 1) that Reason (as defined from a Western, Humanist perspective) actually impedes moral development, and 2) that this is so because morality is actually an emergent behavior-in other words, a behavior exhibited by organisms acting according to very simple rules requiring little reasoning, but behavior that results in a complex system, a system which is, in fact, the basis for the order of the Universe, and which is replicated even by organisms without brains… How’s that for outlandish claims?!

To begin, I would like to make it clear that my argument does not rely on a renunciation of reasoning or logic as the basis for morality. To the contrary. While it is a particular conceptualization of reasoning that is the focus of my critique (the Humanist, Individualistic definition of reasoning, or Reasoning), my entire argument rests on the foundation that morality is a form of logic. In this, I take a page directly out of Piaget, who produced one of the most elegant memes about the relationship between morality and logic that I have found, quoted below by Gibbs:

The intertwining of morality with logic is expressed in Piaget’s famous assertion: “Morality is the logic of action just as logic is the morality of thought.” In other words, the two intimately interrelate: Moral reciprocity is rational just as rationality is prescriptive. (Gibbs, p. 36)

Usually, Piaget’s statement is taken as a strong argument for the case that, as his next line suggests, “pure reason [is] the arbitrer both of theoretical reflection and daily practice” (quoted in Dreyfus, 1990). But I would like to take the liberty of using Piaget’s words against his own position by interpreting his statement to mean, simply, that moral reciprocity (”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) makes logical sense-it’s just how the Universe works. According to this interpretation of Piaget, logic is moral in that there are right and wrong answers (2+2=4, not 3 or 5). Likewise, moral action is logical in that moral reciprocity makes as much sense as 2+2=4, and moral irreciprocity makes as much sense as 2+2=5. But this has more to do with the way the Universe works than with the particular characteristics of ‘pure reason.’ The fact that moral reciprocity does not require pure reason has been exemplified, among other instances, by the Prisoners’ Dilemma competitions. In this tournament, simple software routines that learn to cooperate with each other do better than those that focus on competing with each other (for a recount of these tournaments, see for example Grossman, 2004). This kind of behavior is referred to as emergence.

But before I discuss how the logic of moral reciprocity is evident in the emergent behavior of organisms in the Universe, I would like to discuss what happens when this order is disrupted by Individualistic Reasoning. My thesis is that the Universe would work much better without this brand of ‘logic’ and that Individualistic Reasoning is in fact a deviation from the type of logic that actually promotes moral behavior.

If a scapegoat must be named, his name is René Descartes. The problem is that Descartes convinced himself that all we have access to in the world is our own private experience. Descartes, following on the footsteps of the Skeptics but armed with the new language of modern science, questioned the reality of perception. He did this on the grounds that our sensory organs, such as eyes, ears, skin, etc., are very imperfect transmitters of information to the brain, which is the only organ capable of interpreting and acting on that information. For example, it is the brain that activates signals of pain received by a particular part of the body, or creates an itch where an amputated limb used to be. It is also the brain that makes things seem real during dreaming, when in reality they don’t exist. So our access to reality is indirect, mediated by the imperfect senses and actualized only by the brain. This line of thinking lead Descartes to believe that the only thing we could be certain of was therefore the content of our brains, and everything in the outside world was consequently less real, or not real at all.

This Skeptical view was eventually contested (after three centuries!) by various schools, including the Pragmatics and the Existential Phenomenologists, who argued that there was no point in even asking how we perceive the ‘external’ world because we are embedded right into it, inseparable from it. As Heidegger argued, there is no such thing as a subject who is not being-in-the-world. “Taking the skeptic seriously and attempting to prove that there is an external world presupposes a separation of the mind from the world of things and other people that defies a phenomenological description of how human beings make sense of everyday things and of themselves” (Dreyfus, 2000, p. 53).

What interests me here is the particular anti-social way in which Reasoning was defined by Descartes and adopted by Western Humanism. Under this rubric, logic (including moral logic) has been defined in the West as something the individual does in isolation, not as part of a system. Norbert Elias describes the antisocial consequences of Descartes’ philosophy as follows:

Descartes’ Cogito ["I think therefore I am"], with its accent on the I, was also a sign of this change in the position of the individual person in his society… The isolated thinker perceived himself-or more precisely, his own thought, his ‘reason’-as the only real, indubitable thing. All else might possibly be an illusion conjured up by the Devil, but not this, not his own existence as thinker. This form of I-identity, the perception of one’s own person as a we-less I, has spread wide and deep since then. (Elias, 1998, p. 231-232)

Individual Reasoning subverts morality by disassociating the acts of the individual from the emergent acts of the ecosystem, of the we. Humanism, in its rush to liberate humankind from “illogical” (read: religiously imposed) morals, made it practically impossible to act in accordance with the logic of the Universe, a logic that Humanist Science itself claims to try to understand! In order to substantiate this claim before I am labeled an obscurantist, I need to finally turn to my statement that morality is an emergent phenomenon. What is emergence?

Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It’s what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts-often there are thousands or millions of them-and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up. (Steven Johnson, in an interview with Sims & Dornfest, 2002)

Johnson argues that emergent systems

solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent “executive branch.” They are bottom up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below… In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence. (2002, p. 18)

Johnson indicates that “[e]mergent behaviors… are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts” (2002, p. 181).

How does morality fit into this model? Well, the simple rule is moral reciprocity. The “stupid” agents are all living things (regardless of their level of reasoning). The complex emergent behavior, the sum greater than the parts, is Universal Order. One of the things that makes emergent systems durable and easy to propagate is that they are adaptive. Moral reciprocity is universal because there is no “executive branch” that needs to tell everything in the Universe how to behave; rather, the ‘DNA’ of the behavior is widely spread, and organisms-from simple jellyfish to complex humans-can adapt the rules and work out contextually what the logical/morally-right thing to do is.

This does not mean, obviously, that humans have as easy of a time as jellyfish in applying moral reciprocity. Humans are complex organisms living in complex social settings. However, as Dreyfus (1990) argues, the idea that therefore an intellectual approach to moral reasoning is bound to be superior than an intuitive approach might have more to do with our Cartesian biases than with the way things actually work. Dreyfus puts forth a model of moral development that resembles more the process of gaining mastery in driving a vehicle or playing chess than the process of philosophizing: expertise does not constitute deep pondering and analyzing of each move, but comes intuitively:

The intellectualist account of self-sufficient cognition fails to distinguish the involved deliberation of an intuitive expert facing a familiar but problematic situation from the detached deliberation of an expert facing a novel situation in which he has no intuition and can best resort to abstract principles… [I]n familiar but problematic situations, rather than standing back and applying abstract principles, the expert deliberates about the appropriateness of his intuitions. (p. 13)

This constitutes, in effect, a reversal of the “Western and male belief in the maturity and superiority of critical detachment” (p. 23). Instead of the ideal of a detached, uninvolved brain making sense of suspect sensory signals, “[t]he highest form of ethical comportment is seen to consist in being able to stay involved [in the world] and to refine one’s intuitions” (p. 23). I interpret this to mean that, unlike jellyfish, we constantly create and encounter new moral dilemmas, and thus have to “reason” our way back to emergent moral reciprocity-to the logic of the Universe-not by applying abstract principles, but by contextualizing our intuitions. Only in situations that are completely alien to us, argues Dreyfus, do we fall back on abstract moral rules, but “it should be no surprise if falling back on them produces inferior responses. The resulting decisions are necessarily crude since they have not been refined by the experience of the results of a variety of intuitive responses to emotion-laden situations and the learning that comes from subsequent satisfaction and regret” (p. 13).

In short, when individuals apply Individualistic Reasoning to define morals (in an attempt to become the “executive branch” of morality), they stop being part of the emergent system, of the universal order. Individualistic Reasoning presupposes that morality is a function of the rational elite, those organisms with advanced reasoning skills (who for some strange reason are mostly white adult males). Emergent moral reasoning, on the other hand, presupposes that moral reciprocity is a function of the Universe. Everything and everyone acts morally in the sense that their interactions are part of the logic of the Universe, the logic of moral reciprocity. Moral reciprocity just makes logical sense, like 2+2=4; it just happens. It is encoded into everything in the Universe.

Individualistic Reasoning, which assumes that higher reasoning results in higher morality, disrupts this balance by trying to make the system top-down, not bottom-up. In other words, Humanism has placed rational humans as the source of morality. Morality is what highly rational humans say it is, not what the rest of the Universe is telling us it is. Thus, Individual Reasoning-even if it spouses the highest ideals-ends up disturbing the logic of moral action by limiting the domain and practice of morality to the actions of “mature” rational beings.

Some might wonder: if moral reciprocity was really the order of the Universe, how come there is evil in the world? How come killer whales kill senselessly, cats torture mice, and humans commit the most atrocious acts against each other-all of which make it hard to believe that moral reciprocity rules the Universe? The answer to this question is that immorality, in the form of moral irreciprocity, is also part of the emergent system. In fact, it actually serves a very important pedagogical function. It ensures that moral reciprocity spreads virally, in the sense that by suffering or observing moral irreciprocity, everything in the Universe learns-using the most basic reasoning skills, if not mere instincts-that moral reciprocity is the only strategy that guarantees survival. Even the Prisoners’ Dilemma software can figure that out quickly. If we didn’t have deviations (in the form of moral irreciprocity), we would not be aware that moral reciprocity makes logical sense. The exception proves the rule.

Of course, chaos is part of an emergent system, which means that moral reciprocity and moral irreciprocity are not in perfect balance at all times and in all places. In fact, because moral irreciprocity channeled through Individualistic Reasoning-although illogical-satisfies the needs of the individual, and because we live at a time in which Humanism has made the Individual the center of the Universe, we are currently experiencing a larger proportion of moral irreciprocity (ironically, under the guise of Humanism). However, as this places an inordinate stress in the emergent system, we can expect the laws of chaos to eventually enact an adjustment. It’s just our job to help it along the way by surrendering ourselves to emergent moral reasoning, by letting go of our egocentric
belief in ourselves as superior moral beings

References

Dreyfus, H. (1990). What is moral maturity? A phenomenological account of the development of ethical expertise. Retrieved on December 17, 2004 from http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/rtf/Moral_Maturity_8_90.rtf

Dreyfus, H. (2000). Telepistemology: Descartes’ last stand. In K. Goldberg (Ed.), The Robot in the Garden (pp. 48-63). Massachusetts: MIT Press

Elias, N. (1998). The Norbert Elias reader: a biographical selection. (J. Goudsblom, Ed.), Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers

Gibbs, J.C. (2003). Moral development and reality: beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE

Gilligan, C. (1977). In a different voice: Women’s conceptions of self and of morality. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 481-517.

Grossman, W. (2004). New tack wins prisoner’s dilemma. Retrieved on December 17, 2004 from http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65317,00.html

Hoffman, M.L. (2002). Empathy and moral development: implications for caring and justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Johnson, S. (2002). Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. 1st Touchstone ed. New York: Simon & Schuster

Sims, D., & Dornfest, R. (2002). Steven Johnson on “Emergence.” Retrieved on December 16, 2004 from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/02/22/johnson.html

[Note: Originally submitted as a term paper for a Moral Development class]