The essay below is an adapted excerpt from my new book The Evolution of God. It’s about “the moral imagination”—a term that has been used in various ways but, in my usage, refers to the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of other people, especially people in circumstances very different from our own. I argue that the moral imagination naturally tends to expand when we perceive our relations with other people as non-zero-sum and to contract when we perceive those relations as zero-sum.

This excerpt is a chapter that comes near the end of the book, after I’ve made an argument that, at the risk of oversimplification, boils down to this: In general, when a religious groups sees its relations with another religious group as non-zero-sum, it is more likely to evince tolerance of that group’s religion. When the perception is instead of a zero-sum dynamic, tolerance is less likely to ensue. (For an essay-length version of the argument, see this article, based on the book, that I wrote for Time magazine.) The moral imagination, I contend, is involved in this adaptive process.

For most of the book I make this argument by reference to the past. I tell the story of the Abrahamic God as he passes through three thresholds: the emergence of monotheism in ancient Israel, the emergence of Christianity, and the emergence of Islam. I argue that, during all these phases, fluctuations between tolerant and belligerent scriptures—in both the Judeo-Christian Bible and in the Koran—largely reflect fluctuations between zero-sum and non-zero-sum situations (or, strictly speaking, between the perception of zero-sumness and the perception of non-zero-sumness).

With the chapter excerpted below, the book becomes forward looking. It addresses such questions as (a) whether dynamics in the modern world are sufficiently non-zero-sum to in principle foster greater tolerance among the Abrahamic faiths; (b) whether, if so, this principle will indeed be translated into practice. In the process the chapter raises questions about whether human psychology naturally impedes comprehending the true motivations of enemies, even when this comprehension would be in our interest; and (c) whether such comprehension would entail absolving enemies of blame for their actions.

Our Misfiring Mental Machinery

You might not guess it to read the headlines, but by and large the relationship between “the West” and “the Muslim World” is non-zero-sum. To be sure, the relationship between some Muslims and the West is zero-sum. Terrorist leaders have aims that are at odds with the welfare of Westerners. The West’s goal is to hurt their cause, to deprive them of new recruits and of political support. But if we take a broader view—look not at terrorists and their supporters but at Muslims in general, look not at radical Islam but at Islam—the “Muslim world” and the “West” are playing a non-zero-sum game; their fortunes are positively correlated. And the reason is that what’s good for Muslims broadly is bad for radical Muslims. If Muslims get less happy with their place in the world, more resentful of their treatment by the West, support for radical Islam will grow, so things will get worse for the West. If, on the other hand, more and more Muslims feel respected by the West and feel they benefit from involvement with it, that will cut support for radical Islam, and Westerners will be more secure from terrorism.

This isn’t an especially arcane piece of logic. The basic idea is that terrorist leaders are the enemy and they thrive on the discontent of Muslims—and if what makes your enemy happy is the discontent of Muslims broadly, then you should favor their contentment. Obviously. Indeed this view has become conventional wisdom: if the West can win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims, it will have “drained the swamp” in which terrorists thrive. In that sense, there is widespread recognition in the West of the non-zero-sum dynamic.

But this recognition hasn’t always led to sympathetic overtures from Westerners toward Muslims. The influential evangelist Franklin Graham declared that Muslims don’t worship the same god as Christians and Jews and that Islam is a “very evil and wicked religion.” That’s no way to treat people you’re in a non-zero-sum relationship with! And Graham is not alone. Lots of evangelical Christians and other Westerners view Muslims with suspicion, and view relations between the West and the Muslim world as a “clash of civilizations.” And many Muslims view the West in similarly win-lose terms.

So what’s going on here? Where’s the part of human nature that was on display in ancient times—the part that senses whether you’re in the same boat as another group of people and, if you are, fosters sympathy for or at least tolerance of them?

It’s in there somewhere, but it’s misfiring. And one big reason is that our mental equipment for dealing with game-theoretical dynamics was designed for a hunter-gatherer environment, not for the modern world. That’s why dealing with current events wisely requires strenuous mental effort—effort that ultimately, as it happens, could bring moral progress.

Processing the Clash of Civilizations

If you are a Christian or Jew in, say, the United States, and you’re trying to come to terms with the “Muslim world,” much if not most of your input is electronic. You may not encounter many Muslims in real life, but you see them on TV. So your feelings toward Muslims in general depend largely on which Muslims wind up on TV.

For starters, there’s Osama bin Laden. His interests are sharply opposed to America’s interests, so if American minds are working as designed, they should sense this zero-sumness and react with antipathy and moral revulsion. And that is indeed the standard reaction.

And what about bin Laden’s foot soldiers—the people who actually commit the acts of terrorism? If anything, the Western relationship with them is even more unalterably zero-sum than with bin Laden. Bin Laden, after all, is at some level a rational actor. He seems to want to stay alive and hold on to prominence, and sometimes goals like that lead people toward compromise. Some terrorist foot soldiers don’t even seem to want to stay alive. So certainly when Westerners look at terrorists and view them with antipathy and intolerance, the mental equipment is working as designed: Westerners are sensing a stubborn zero-sum dynamic and reacting aptly.

Of course, terrorists and their leaders are a pretty small subset of Muslims. If you’re going to develop an attitude toward the “Muslim world,” it would be nice to have more data points. What other Muslims show up on TV? Well, there were the thousands of Muslims protesting in sometimes violent fashion the publication of cartoons of Muhammad. And every once in a while you see a clip of Iranian Muslims burning the American flag.

Here, too, the images evoke reactions of antipathy, and here, too, this reaction would seem to make sense. Surely burning a country’s flag suggests that you see your relationship to it as antagonistic, as zero-sum—and that you’re unlikely to warm up to it anytime soon. And people so fervent as to get riled up over a cartoon don’t look like plausible negotiating partners, either. In mustering antipathy toward these seemingly confirmed foes, the mind is working as designed.

But is it working well? Is antipathy toward Muslims who seem opposed to Western values, if not the West itself, really in the interest of Westerners? Maybe not, for two reasons.

The first is fairly obvious. You could call it the Franklin Graham reason. Antipathy toward radical Muslims you see on TV could lead you to retaliate rhetorically in a broad-brush way and say things offensive to all Muslims. You might, for example, call Islam a “very evil and wicked religion.” This may alienate Muslims who aren’t yet cartoon protesters or flag burners but would be more likely to burn a flag post-alienation.

There’s a second reason why antipathy toward flag burners and cartoon protesters may make for bad strategy, and it’s less obvious.

If one of The Evolution of God’s main premises is correct—if scriptural interpretation is obedient to facts on the ground—then flag burners and cartoon protesters who are acting under the influence of radical religious ideas came under that influence for a reason. Somewhere in the past are facts that account for their interpretation of their faith. And even if that interpretation has become basically unshakable—even if every flag burner and cartoon protester is beyond changing—there would still be virtue in finding out what those facts are. After all, keeping more moderate Muslims from joining the ranks of the exercised would be nice, and knowing what circumstances made the exercised Muslims exercised might aid that task. By the same token, it would be nice to understand why suicide bombers become suicide bombers—not so we could help them become moderates (good luck!), but so we could keep moderates from becoming them.

And here is the problem with feeling antipathy toward those cartoon protesters, flag burners, and even suicide bombers. It isn’t that pouring lots of sympathy on them would help things. (In some ways it could hurt.) It’s that, because of the way the human mind is built, antipathy can impede comprehension. Hating protesters, flag burners, and even terrorists makes it harder to understand them well enough to keep others from joining their ranks.

Moral Imagination

The way hatred blocks comprehension is by cramping our “moral imagination,” our capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of another person. This cramping isn’t unnatural. Indeed, the tendency of the moral imagination to shrink in the presence of enemies is built into our brains by natural selection. It’s part of the machinery that leads us to grant tolerance and understanding to people we see in non-zero-sum terms and deny it to those we consign to the zero-sum category. We’re naturally pretty good at putting ourselves in the shoes of close relatives and good friends (people who tend to have non-zero-sum links with us), and naturally bad at putting ourselves in the shoes of rivals and enemies (where zero-sumness is more common). We can’t understand these people from the inside.

So what do things look like from the inside? Consider a case where an interior view is available—the case of a good friend. Your friend tells you about an arrogant prima donna at work who drives her nuts, and you are reminded of an arrogant prima donna in high school—the football star, the valedictorian—who drove you nuts. With a friend this process can be automatic: you scour your memory for shared points of reference and so vicariously feel her grievance. It’s part of the deal that sustains your symbiotic relationship: you validate her gripes, she validates yours. You work toward a common perspective.

This is the work you aren’t inclined to do with rivals and enemies. They complain about some arrogant prima donna, and you just can’t relate. (Why are they such whiners?) And that’s of course especially true when they say—as a rival or enemy might—that you are an arrogant prima donna. Then you certainly aren’t struck by the parallels with that prima donna in your high school.

So too on the geopolitical stage: if you are a patriotic American, and people who are burning an American flag say America is arrogant, that prima donna probably won’t spring to mind.

This doesn’t mean you’re at a loss to explain their behavior, or totally blind to their interior lives. When you see people burning flags and they look enraged, you can, even while hating them, correctly surmise that somewhere within them lies rage. You may also grant that flag burners perceive America as arrogant. But you don’t relate to this perception, so you can still characterize them in unflattering terms. You say they are driven by “resentment” of American power and “envy” of American success. And, since envy and resentment aren’t noble motivations, the moral coloration of the situation suggests it’s the flag burners who are to blame. And because America isn’t to blame, you resist the idea that it should change its behavior.

At this point in the discussion, if not sooner, an ominous question is often asked: Wait a minute—are you saying America is an arrogant prima donna? Are you saying that America, not the flag burner, is to blame for the burning of the flags? The question has even more bite if you’re talking about terrorists: Are you saying America was to blame for 9/11? After all, that’s what it would seem like if you really got inside the mind of a terrorist.

The short answer is no. But it’s a “no” with an asterisk, a “no” in need of elaboration–and, since the elaboration is a bit arcane, I’ve relegated it to an online appendix. It’s recommended reading, because if you buy the argument it may radically alter your view of the world. But for now the point is just that the ability to intimately comprehend someone’s motivation—to share their experience virtually, and know it from the inside—depends on a moral imagination that naturally contracts in the case of people we consider rivals or enemies.

In other words, we have trouble achieving comprehension without achieving sympathy. And this puts us in a fix because, as we’ve seen, some people it is in our profound interest to comprehend—terrorists, for example—are people we’re understandably reluctant to sympathize with. Enmity’s natural impediment to understanding is, in a way, public enemy number one.

It’s easy to explain the origins of this impediment in a conjectural way. Our brains evolved in a world of hunter-gatherer societies. In that world, morally charged disputes had Darwinian consequence. If you were in a bitter and public argument with a rival over who had wronged whom, the audience’s verdict could affect your social status and your access to resources, both of which could affect your chances of getting genes into the next generation. So the ability to argue persuasively that your rival had no valid grounds for grievance would have been favored by natural selection, as would tendencies abetting this ability—such as a tendency to believe that your rival had no valid grounds for grievance, a belief that could infuse your argument with conviction. And nothing would so threaten this belief as the ability to look at things from a rival’s point of view.

In dealing with allies, on the other hand, a more expansive moral imagination makes sense. Since their fortunes are tied to yours—since you’re in a non-zero-sum relationship—lending your support to their cause can be self-serving (and besides, it’s part of the implicit deal through which they support your cause). So on some occasions, at least, we’re pretty good at seeing the perspective of friends or relatives. It helps us argue for their interests—which, after all, overlap with our interests—and helps us bond with them by voicing sympathy for their plight.

In short, the moral imagination, like other parts of the human mind, is designed to steer us through the successful playing of games—to realize the gains of non-zero-sum games when those gains are to be had, and to get the better of the other party in zero-sum games. Indeed, the moral imagination is one of the main drivers of the pattern we’ve seen throughout the book: the tendency to find tolerance in one’s religion when the people in question are people you can do business with and to find intolerance or even belligerence when you perceive the relationship to be instead zero-sum.

And now we see one curious residue of this machinery: our “understanding” of the motivations of others tends to come with a prepackaged moral judgment. Either we understand their motivation internally, even intimately—relate to them, extend moral imagination to them, and judge their grievances leniently—or we understand their motivation externally and in terms that imply the illegitimacy of their grievances. Pure understanding, uncolored by judgment, is hard to come by.

It might be nice if we could sever this link between comprehension and judgment, if we could understand people’s behavior in more clinical terms—just see things from their point of view without attaching a verdict to their grievances. That might more closely approach the perspective of God and might also, to boot, allow us to better pursue our interests. We could coolly see when we’re in a non-zero-sum relationship with someone, coolly appraise their perspective, and coolly decide to make those changes in our own behavior that could realize non-zero-sumness. But those of us who fail to attain Buddhahood will spend much of our lives locked into a more human perspective: we extend moral imagination to people to the extent that we see win-win possibilities with them.

Given this fact, the least we can do is ask that the machinery work as designed: that when we are in a non-zero-sum relationship with someone we do extend moral imagination to them. That would better serve the interests of both parties and would steer us toward a truer understanding of the other—toward an understanding of what their world looks like from the inside.

And this is what often fails to happen. The bulk of Westerners and the bulk of Muslims are in a deeply non-zero-sum relationship, yet by and large aren’t very good at extending moral imagination to one another.

So a machine that was designed to serve our interests is misfiring. The moral imagination was built to help us discriminate between people we can do business with and people we can’t do business with—to expand or contract, respectively. When Americans fail to extend moral imagination to Muslims, this is their unconscious mind’s way of saying, “We judge these people to be not worth dealing with.” Yet most of them are worth dealing with.

We’ve already seen one reason for this malfunction. Technology is warping our perception of the other player in this non-zero-sum game. The other player is a vast population of Muslims who, though perhaps not enamored of the West, don’t spend their time burning flags and killing Westerners. But what we see on TV—and what we may conflate with this other player—is a subset of Muslims who truly, and perhaps irreversibly, hate the West. We accurately perceive the stubborn hostility of the latter and our moral imagination contracts accordingly, but in the process it excludes the former.

—

Robert Wright is the author of The Evolution of God (from which this essay is drawn), a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads TV.

Suppose you are walking along a deserted path in the mountains and meet a stranger traveling in the opposite direction. You are running low on food, but he has plenty. He is running low on water, but you have plenty. Thus, you are in a position to help each other out, to swap some water for some food, to play a non-zero-sum game. However, while you approach each other, you and the stranger are not playing any game at all—the game is mere potential. If you were so inclined, you could instead choose to play a zero-sum game with him: bopping him on the head, stealing everything he has, and leaving him for dead. Or he might choose to try that out on you. Or you could walk past each other with a polite nod and play no game at all.

From this little scenario there are a couple of simple but important lessons to draw. First, there is a huge difference between being in a position to potentially play a non-zero-sum game with someone and actually playing such a game. A phrase that Wright likes to use—”being in a non-zero-sum relation”—fudges this distinction; it is ambiguous between (A) two parties being in a position to exchange costs and benefits in a mutually beneficial manner, and (B) two parties actually engaged in doing so. It may be granted that the Western world and the Muslim world are well-positioned to engage in a fruitful non-zero-sum game; it doesn’t follow that they are so engaged.

The second point to draw attention to is that although it is easy to get transfixed by the idea that non-zero-sumness is a wonderful thing, we should not forget that it is not always superior to zero-sumness. From a purely material selfish point of view, you really might be better off bopping the stranger on the head and stealing all he owns (assuming he is no threat, assuming you can escape punishment, etc.). Of course, that would be a cruel and immoral way to behave, and I’m not seriously recommending such practices. All I’m saying is that, in terms of self-gain, when an individual has the option of choosing to play either a non-zero-sum game or a zero-sum game with someone, sometimes the former will be the optimal choice and sometimes the latter will be; it depends on many variables in the environment of interaction.

For all the importance that non-zero-sum games have had in the process of evolution and the rise of civilization, it is vital that we don’t apotheosize or sentimentalize the relation to the extent that we think “non-zero-sum = good” and “zero-sum = bad.” Exploiting the heck out of the other guy has also played a huge role in the process of evolution and the rise of civilization. Thus, even if it is granted for the sake of argument that the western world and the Muslim world are presently engaged in a grand non-zero-sum game, it doesn’t automatically follow that it is in the best interests of either party to continue in this manner. Should one party get the opportunity to crush the other and take the whole cake, it is entirely logically possible that this is what that party should do.

If that seems like a chilling conclusion, let me first stress that I am speaking wholly in the abstract; I am certainly not recommending any actual practice or policy. The chilling conclusion arises only if one is assessing game strategies purely in terms of self-gain—which is not an attitude I recommend. And yet it seems to be Wright’s attitude. He advocates tolerance towards the Muslim world on the grounds that tolerance begets understanding, and through understanding we can better prevent the ranks of terrorists from swelling, which will be “in the interests of westerners.” Now, let me emphasize first that I’m all for keeping the ranks of terrorists from swelling, and I’m all for tolerance and understanding of other cultures, even hostile ones. (For the record, my attitude towards the relations between the Western and Muslim worlds is that of a typical liberal, globalized, tolerant, Obama-voter—so much so that even using phrases like “the West” and “the Muslim world” makes me uneasy.) There is, however, something unsettling about attempting to justify these attitudes purely by an appeal to self-interest.

First of all, there are psychological limitations to what can be achieved by an appeal to self-interest. If I offer you a million dollars to utter the sentence “1+1=3″ I’m sure you’ll comply; but my money is likely to remain safely mine if I ask you to believe that 1+1=3. Similarly, we can be moved by self-interest to implement more tolerant behavior and policies; it is less obvious that an appeal to self-interest can get us to have a more tolerant attitudes and beliefs. If part of having a tolerant attitude is caring about the other party’s welfare in its own right, then attempting to foster that attitude by reference to our own potential gains will require a psychologically complex process, to say the least. (“It is in your best interests to adopt an attitude of not always privileging your own interests.”)

Secondly, justifying tolerance by appeal to self-interest is also morally troubling. If my sole ground for entering into a non-zero-sum game with someone is that doing so promises to reap rewards for me, then it has to be admitted that if I could reap a greater reward by crushing the other player then that is what I should do. Wright will object that the West’s interests are not served by “crushing the other player”—and I do not doubt that this is correct. My point is that we should be disturbed by the contingency of the answer: were the social environment to alter (a little? a lot?), an uncompromising pursuit of the zero-sum policy would, by the same prudential logic, be called for. One should be worried about a justificatory principle that could legitimize the carpet bombing of innocents even if, as a matter of fact, at the moment that principle is calling for group hugs all round. Call me a romantic if you will, but I would be more comfortable to see tolerance of others recommended on the grounds that they are human beings as deserving of dignity and consideration as anyone. Any temptation to add “…and we should grant them this dignity and consideration because ultimately it is in our own interests to do so” to my mind actually undermines the authority of the case.

I should like, also, to advise extreme caution in accepting Wright’s quick evolutionary account of why it was adaptive for our ancestors to be able to distinguish non-zero-sum from zero-sum games and respond accordingly. It’s easy to tell a Just So story about why having such a trait would have been reproductively useful; it is quite another thing to conclude that we really have some psychological machinery in place dedicated to this activity. By parody, it is easy to tell a story about why being able to weave baskets would have been extremely useful to our ancestors—no doubt it was incredibly useful—but we don’t on these grounds conclude that the human mind contains a dedicated psychological adaptation devoted to basket-weaving. Rather, the skill of basket-weaving arose from the happy confluence of other adaptive mechanisms—nimble fingers, hand-eye coordination, a planning mind, etc.—just as our ability to drive cars is made possible by a bunch of innate mechanisms but is not itself an innate adaptation. Indeed, the very fact that our ancestors’ extant traits sufficed to make possible basket-weaving means that there was no further selective pressure in favor of a dedicated basket-weaving psychological mechanism.

I would suggest that the same thing goes with respect to our ability to distinguish non-zero-sum interactions from zero-sum interactions and respond accordingly. After a certain point, our ancestors were already adept at publicly discussing matters, negotiating, resolving conflicts (or prosecuting them, as the case may be), spotting threats and opportunities, and so on. The fact that the suite of adaptations underlying these traits was sufficient to produce the skills of distinguishing non-zero-sum games from zero-sum games and responding accordingly shows that there existed no independent selective pressure in favor of the emergence of a psychological mechanism specifically devoted to the task. Someone who claims that there is such a mechanism needs to do much more than tell a plausible story about why such a skill would have been adaptive. He must provide empirical evidence—or at least indicate where we might look for empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis. (For example, are there certain kinds of brain damage that selectively impair a person’s ability to distinguish non-zero-sum games from zero-sum games? Does this ability emerge suddenly in childhood, in a manner disproportionate to the child’s learning environment?)

Once more for the record: I am all in favor of tolerance among nations and religions, and I particularly despise the way that the western media portrays Muslim stereotypes. However, no matter how heartily I endorse the ends that Wright hopes to effect, as a philosopher my task is to critically examine the arguments he offers in support of those laudable ends–and here I have my doubts.

—

Richard Joyce is an International Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and the author of The Evolution of Morality.

Reduced to its essence, Robert Wright’s ambitious and instructive essay makes three empirical claims and then prescribes a class of policies.

First, it observes correctly that as individuals we carry in our heads models that help us interpret such phenomena as interactions among societies, the production of wealth, and social conflict. Second, the essay proposes, again correctly, that mental models influence our actions and reactions, including our dealings with individuals who differ from ourselves in appearance, cultural background, faith, or religiosity. Thus, a person convinced that human interactions produce zero-sum outcomes will view outsiders seeking enrichment as enemies who must be blocked, resisted, diminished, perhaps even killed. Teach the same person that interactions with outsiders can be mutually beneficial, and he will get interested in trade, joint investment, and educational exchanges. The essay’s third empirical claim is that ongoing conflicts between Muslims and Westerners stem largely from zero-sum mentalities that blind individuals on both sides to the potential gains from cooperation.

These three claims lead to the policy prescription that an effective way to reduce tensions among Muslims and the West is to reconstruct the dominant mental models on the two sides. If American TV screens flash fewer images of hate-spouting, straggly-bearded, and flag-burning Pakistanis, Americans will develop a more positive image of Muslims; and this change in perception will then predispose Americans to cooperate with Muslims and address joint problems in a spirit of good will. Likewise, if Arab textbooks stop blaming all ills of the Arab world on evil colonizers who prospered by plundering superior civilizations, Arabs will more readily recognize the immense benefits that they have already reaped from their interactions with the West. Their minds opened up to the possibility of mutually profitable cooperation, they will shed their hostility and start pursuing cooperative ventures with non-Muslims.

Wright’s three claims contain many grains of truth. Moreover, there is no doubt that changing Muslim and Western perceptions concerning their interactions with one another would diminish interreligious tensions, facilitate solutions to various global crises, and make it easier to generate effective responses to chronic problems of the Muslim world. Yet, achieving these desirable outcomes requires much more than campaigns to alter perceptions. Two of Wright’s claims are only partly true, and the missing factors have critical policy implications.

People’s actions and reactions depend on more than their mental models. They depend also, and in politically charged contexts primarily, on the prevailing social pressures. Consider the resident of an impoverished, Taliban-controlled area of Pakistan. When he opts to participate in an anti-American demonstration, he need not be acting on the belief that global trade produces zero-sum effects. His principal motivation may well be that by endorsing Islamism publicly and openly aiding a Taliban-supported cause he gains social status, economic advantages, and even physical security. Suppose we pluck that person out of the Pakistani-Afghan border area, place him in a peaceful neighborhood of Lahore, and give him a lucrative job. Living among Muslims at ease with modernity and facing a different set of social pressures, he will no longer feel compelled to demonstrate against foreigners. Obviously, what goes for one demonstrator goes for the rest. Each joins the demonstration, in part, because others in his neighborhood are demonstrating. Hence, what explains the anti-American demonstration in question is a collective process, not simply a faulty mental model that shapes myriads of individual actions independently.

The essay’s other problematic claim is that participants in global conflicts tend to think in zero-sum terms. In fact, such players are not necessarily overlooking opportunities that become obvious with a proper education. On the contrary, many troublemakers have a highly realistic understanding of their actual opportunities in life. Consider the extreme example of the suicide bomber. He (the typical profile is a poorly educated young man) knows that his own ability to benefit from global trade is very low. He also knows that if he succeeds in sowing fear in adversaries through death and destruction, he will be treated as a martyr, and his wife, children, and parents will gain social status. By participating in the suicide mission, he will thus give his kin material opportunities that otherwise would be out of their reach. Obviously hatred toward the adversary and a zero-sum mentality could be contributing motivations. The suicide bomber who believes that an adversary’s loss brings his own society an equivalent gain will have an additional reason to act. But such zero-sum reasoning is not a necessary condition for becoming a religious terrorist.

My two key points are (1) that Muslim hostility toward the West, such as it exists, is a collective process and (2) that the individuals who join anti-Western movements are motivated substantially by their opportunities. It follows that teaching radical Muslims to view their interactions with non-Muslims as positive-sum processes will not necessarily turn them into friendly, peaceful, and democratic-minded negotiators. For one thing, wealth-generating positive-sum processes are of no use to them if they themselves have no hope of sharing in the benefits. Although Pakistan as a whole benefits handsomely from producing footballs for Nike and Adidas, its youth in Swat and Waziristan remain mired in poverty. For another, Muslims trapped in radicalized areas will not consider themselves free to cooperate with even secular Pakistanis, let alone foreigners. Knowing that abandoning the radical cause is to risk severe retaliation, they may refrain from publicizing their changes of heart and mind in the interest of self-preservation.

Neither Pakistanis nor Muslims in general are suffering from a unique constellation of problems. Prior to 1989, Europeans living under communist rule found it prudent to refrain from criticizing their horribly inefficient regimes and from demanding the right to trade openly with other nations, to read books of their choice, and to travel abroad freely. Growing numbers understood that the French and the West Germans lived far better than them; and also that French and West German prosperity had something to do with liberties denied to peoples living under communism. Still, the vast majority remained quiet for years on end, because of perceived pressures to conform publicly to communist demands. If six communist regimes collapsed suddenly in 1989, followed by the USSR two years later, the reason is that interconnected political developments changed the perceived personal risks of dissent sufficiently to trigger anti-regime cascades. The consequent revolutions then ended the Cold War. The relevant point here is that the tensions between former communists and the non-communist world eased through collective processes that made public opposition to communism feed on itself. Many of the Muslims who now exhibit hostility to democratic and developed countries are in a bind analogous to that of the Russians and East Germans of the mid-1980s. As individuals they generally admire many aspects of the West, and if it were prudent, they would happily pursue available opportunities to cooperate with Westerners for mutual gain.

A campaign to increase Muslim awareness of potential gains from international trade, foreign investment, and joint research will have minimal observable effects, then, unless coupled with programs that enable the learners to profit from their new information. What sorts of programs would put in place the prerequisites for success? Campaigns that weaken hostile networks and make their members freer to choose for themselves are essential. So are projects that enhance the economic opportunities of radicalized adversaries, including ones that provide better skills and employment opportunities. Establishing the rule of law is another prerequisite, as it encourages individuals to think for themselves and to act on their own judgments.

Readers familiar with the trajectory of the American occupation of Iraq will notice that these suggestions conform to the logic behind the successful military surge of 2007. Sunni Iraqis are now noticeably friendlier toward American forces, and also noticeably less tolerant of militants. This is because the surge and associated policies have enhanced Iraqi security, weakened Sunni Islamist groups, and given the individual Sunni Iraqi a stake in domestic peace.

There is no question that we all need to be reminded, again and again as we sail through life, about the distinction between zero-sum and positive-sum interactions. It helps also to be alerted to the commonness of situations presenting opportunities for mutual gain. In teaching economics and political science it never ceases to amaze me how it comes as a revelation to many students that when a politically powerless pauper does business with an influential millionaire, both sides may benefit. For that reason alone, I consider Wright’s essay instructive and useful. Yet solving the world’s major conflicts requires an analysis grounded a richer sense of human behavior.

—

Timur Kuran is professor of economics and political science and the Gorter Family Chair in Islamic Studies at Duke University

Author’s Note: Wright’s piece published by Cato Unbound is valuably read with his companion essay in the Atlantic, especially by anyone interested in the powerful religious arguments that he advances. I’ve taken the liberty of reacting to both, in hopes of putting the specifically religious questions on the table.

****

The first explicitly game-theoretical argument ever written began like this: “God is, or He is not…. to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here…. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?”

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal–for he was the author, of course, and the date, 1660—answered simply. “Wager without hesitation that He is,” for there is “an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain,” but only “a finite number of chances of loss.”

What was Pascal after? Simply put, conversion. He offered the wager as a gift of Christian charity to the unbeliever. This charity he modeled on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, “for Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” The doubtful would trip over his wager, Pascal hoped, and tumble through conversion into belief.

Importantly, conversion was never a morally neutral project, neither for him nor Paul. Adding another Christian to the world doubtless served the Christian community. But at heart of the conversion impulse was (and is) the conviction that the moral profit belongs to the new believer. The moral game of Christian conversion, in other words, is non-zero sum: the evangelist benefits, and so does the evangelee.

Few saints were as clear (and ruthless) on this point as Augustine of Hippo. In a brief arguing for the Roman imperial suppression—he called it a “correction”—of the sect of heretic Christians known as Donatists, he compared them to raging madmen, who hate the physicians that would restore them to health. What they call violence and persecution, Augustine noted, is actually therapy for the sick soul. The “Church of Christ… persecutes in the spirit of love,” he wrote. What greater act of charity than recalling men from the path of destruction and turning them to God?

Here’s the point: zero sum and non-zero sum relationships depend on where you stand. The Donatists, ground under the imperial boot, found themselves playing a zero-sum game. Augustine’s gain was their loss, and catastrophically so, as things turned out. From Augustine’s perspective, however, this was not true at all. What they lost, according to him, was Hell. And what they got was Heaven.  No doubt Augustine did pretty well for himself, preserving a unified Christian church. But the Donatists came out ahead too, getting an infinitely valuable moral good—access to saving truths—plus the value of true Christian community.  Everybody benefits, right?

Right?

Augustine tells us, I think, something interesting about Wright’s gaming model of the moral imagination. The real stakes of the game do not matter. Or, more precisely, the nature of the game is the real stake. Augustine insisted he was playing a non-zero sum game. A Donatist could not possibly agree, and still remain a Donatist. For them, the difference between zero sum and non-zero sum games was the difference between life and death. The entire struggle turned on the question: what kind of game are we playing?

This was true for Pascal too. Given his argument, even his seventeenth-century peers saw, any promise of infinite goods, however microscopically plausible, would demand your assent. But this weakness in the model didn’t really matter. Pascal was not trying to persuade you of anything specific about God. Rather, his was an effort to persuade you to believe in the game in the first place. Once you commit to the idea of infinite goods—once you start playing Pascal’s game—the game is already over.

And this seems to be true now as well. In his essay, Wright insists that in fact Muslims and Americans have common interests, and for this reason, we should believe in our non-zero sum relationship. In his naturalist language, we would just let the mental “machinery work as designed” and extend moral imagination to people with whom, in fact, our relationship is non-zero sum.

But I don’t see how this “common interest” can be neutrally adjudicated. We may have common interests, indeed. Or maybe not. Or, most likely of all, some are common, and some not. Our vision of political stability, say, may not be their vision of political stability. Even this is too easy: “they” is no doubt a stoutly plural category, with as many different political interests as there are interested parties. The same would go for other interests—economic, social, moral, and religious goods—which themselves are competition with each other. No matter what, though, there is no neutral calculus for converting one interest into another, or weighing one against another. Only cash is fluidly convertible, not interests.

The crucial question, then, is whether we believe that we are playing a non-zero sum game.  And, even more crucially, whether we can persuade others to believe that they too are playing such a game. And Wright recognizes this, I think. His sense that “transactional trust” rested on faith, in ancient times, rather than accurate perception, broadly testifies to this. In modern times, in his view, this trust is fading, the machine is “misfiring,” because modern media are getting in the way, and persuading us to view (real) non-zero sum relations as zero sum relations. Hence the unnecessary conflict between America and the Muslims. Hence too the need for his book, to persuade us (and others) to believe in the non-zero sumness of things.

Persuasion comes in different forms, though. Like Wright, Pascal hoped that his written arguments would win the favor of a public, and change the world. Augustine had more efficient means at his disposal. After all, his letter of correction was addressed to a man named Boniface, the Roman military tribunal charged with the enforcement of anti-Donatist laws in north Africa. Augustine, as it turns out, was here not trying to persuade the Donatists at all. Rather, he wanted to persuade the most powerful empire on earth that the game was non-zero sum, and that it should start knocking some Donatist heads. For their own good, of course.

We might scoff at the transparency of Augustine’s self-interest, but force and politics often decide the nature of the game. Since the beginning, truth be told, modern toleration talk has always depended on authority to enforce the kinds of games at play. John Locke’s 1689 Letter on Toleration, for example, sounds a peaceful note. Anyone “may employ as many exhortations and arguments as he pleases, towards the promoting of another man’s salvation,” but “all force and compulsion are to be forborn.” Locke sought to demolish the Augustinian moral game, to transform the non-zero sum (persecution in the spirit of love) into a zero sum (persecution is just persecution).

But what had the means to do this? Only a powerful state with the monopoly on violence, among whose prerogatives it is to determine what kinds of games are being played with what kinds of interests. It is the state that steps in and determines which interests have trumping power, and which do not. I might firmly believe that forcing you to go to church is a non-zero-sum game (since you would accrue infinite benefits), but the state tells me that I may not, because that is not how the game can be played.

This may sound like a good thing, and certainly it was for some. But definitely not if you happened to be Catholic, exactly those people who “have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate,” in Locke’s world, because of their commitment to papal supremacy. For Catholics, the non-zero-sum game of toleration organized by the modern British state was entirely a zero-sum game. They lost and the Protestants won, and it would take another 150 years before they would be granted a semblance of civil and political equality. And this was not an aberration of the system, but a sign of its smooth operation.

We might go a number of directions here, but I want to conclude with this suggestion: modern conflicts between “the West” and “the Muslims” have less to do with misfiring mental machinery, and more to do with the absence of any recognized authority for determining the kinds of games we are playing, and which interests should count in them. Settling the nature of the game, I suspect, will take more than appeals to a naturalized moral imagination. It will take hard political choices, whose costs will be significant, both to “us” and to “them.” Admitting this up front seems the least we can do, speaking here from the center of our own most powerful of nations.

—

Jonathan Sheehan is an associate professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley

Thanks to all three scholars for taking the time to read and critique the excerpt from my book The Evolution of God. A few thoughts in response:

Richard Joyce’s critique has convinced me that I should have been clearer about a few things. In particular: I’m not, as he asserts, “[morally] justifying tolerance by appeal to self-interest.” I’m trying to sell the idea of tolerance to, e.g., Americans on grounds that it would be in their self-interest. To the extent that I would morally justify tolerance, it would be on the utilitarian grounds that symmetrical tolerance will increase overall welfare. (And I might locate a slightly different kind of justification for tolerance in my view that tolerance can entail a literally truer view of the other—truer in a sense that space doesn’t permit me to spell out.) This clarification renders some of Joyce’s critique moot—at least as a critique of my views, though his analysis is valuable in clarifying various issues (and in convincing me that I haven’t been clear enough).

Joyce also complains that I’m telling a “just-so story” in suggesting that, as he accurately paraphrases me, it “was adaptive for our ancestors to be able to distinguish non-zero-sum from zero-sum games and respond accordingly.” He says that “someone who claims that there is such a mechanism needs to do much more than tell a plausible story about why such a skill would have been adaptive.” I beg to differ. I think I should be free to toss out a hypothesis on the basis of little evidence and then let people argue about it. That’s how a lot of progress in science has started. As it happens, in this case there is evidence that I could have invoked but didn’t–e.g., a large empirical literature on reciprocal altruism (i.e. on psychological mechanisms conducive to playing non-zero-sums) and on the derogation of rivals (i.e. on opinions we express and/or believe regarding people we perceive ourselves to be playing a zero-sum game with). There is also a large literature suggesting that our close relatives, chimpanzees, quite naturally distinguish between zero-sum (rivalrous) and non-zero-sum (coalitional) relationships and seem to have a suite of tactically appropriate behavioral responses. Though it’s not impossible that these behaviors result from conscious calculation, it seems much more likely that they are governed fundamentally by emotions; and it’s not very easy for me to imagine a plausible scenario in which these emotions, in so functioning, aren’t biological adaptations (i.e., aren’t “designed” by natural selection to facilitate the successful playing of non-zero-sum and zero-sum games).

Jonathan Sheehan is definitely right that the various players in a game may differ on the question of what constitutes a gain for each. My essay implicitly assumes that all players are free to define gain for themselves. Thus when I buy something the exchange is non-zero-sum because I would rather have the merchandise than the money and the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise; our respective opinions about our own welfare are all that matters, and any objective “truth” about the value of the merchandise is irrelevant.

Sheehan concludes that “modern conflicts between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslims’ have less to do with misfiring mental machinery, and more to do with the absence of any recognized authority for determining the kinds of games we are playing.” Well, I can certainly imagine a recognized authority with enough influence to settle these conflicts—but in most cases I can’t imagine such an authority showing up in the real world anytime soon. And, in the absence of such an authority, it seems to me that the mental machinery of the players is almost by definition central to solving the conflict (though whether I’m right that the machinery is misfiring is of course another question altogether).

Timur Kuran seems right to say that the terrorism-fomenting zero-sum perceptions I focus on are neither necessary nor sufficient to foment terrorism (though, obviously, I think they’re often very important). I find particularly valuable his emphasis on the social dynamics within Muslim societies, something he knows more about than I do. I’d be interested in his reaction to the speculation that sometimes the problem can be framed this way: The object of the game is to (a) get Muslim elites to view relations with the West as non-zero-sum (a task that in many cases has already been accomplished) and (b) get non-elites in that society to view their relations with these elites as non-zero-sum.

If that sounds too abstract, let me try to concretize it by reference to the fairly common phenomenon of populist nationalism. Populist nationalists gain traction by convincing lower-income people that they stand in a zero-sum relationship with some upper-income people who are gaining from non-zero-sum relations on the international front. The accusation, in other words, is that the upper class is doing business with foreigners at the expense of their lower-income compatriots. When attending international gatherings designed to soothe tensions between “the West” and the “Muslim world,” I’ve often noticed that the Muslim elites in attendance have abundantly cosmopolitan values, but I’ve wondered if they are resented by many non-elites in their societies, a resentment that then translates into anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-Westernism.

Thanks again to everyone.

Let’s think a bit more about this game idea. If you assume, as Wright says he does, that “all players are free to define gain for themselves,” then you are making things too easy on yourself, I think.

In the first instance, Wright’s book is aimed at persuading us that in fact we do (or at least can) have a non-zero-sum relationship with Muslims, and vice versa. As such, it needs to affirm the objective reality of gain, right? If the merchant in his thought experiment were paid with counterfeit bills, for example, we would hardly call this a non-zero-sum game, even if the merchant were perfectly satisfied with the deal.

In an economic model, you can argue that this will work itself out: as soon as the merchant takes his gains to the bank, he’ll realize that the game was zero-sum. How? Because the bank will tell him that, in fact, the money was fake. But in the real political world, this last instant of evaluation never takes place. The values and interests that are being exchanged are not commensurable, and there is no bank to pass the judgment.

Take, for example, the loaded issue of Islam and women’s rights. Forgetting about the Taliban, let’s just look at contemporary France.

Over here, Americans are totally incredulous at the head scarf ban. For us, it makes religious difference into a zero-sum game, forcing women to choose between their religious beliefs and the benefits of state education. Why not just let them choose for themselves? Wouldn’t everyone benefit if the state just stayed out of the way?

The answer, if you are French (or a certain stripe of French), is “no.” They would argue (disingenuously or not, it does not matter) that women are not choosing, but are forced to conform by their husbands and fathers. Our non-zero-sum game, in other words, is really a zero-sum game.

Moreover, they would insist, French citizenship entails a strict secularism: public culture must be free of religious symbolism, since this latter always interferes with the free exercise of civic rights and responsibilities. Secularism is, in other words, a good to the French state whose value is diminished by head-scarves in schools.

The US, on the other hand, simply does not care if parents force their children to wear scarves, or sandals, or anything else. We don’t put any value on protecting people’s rights not to be religiously coerced in this way. Nor do we put any value on secularism—it simply does not weigh into the calculations we make about the nature of the game.

So, does the head-scarf ban violate Muslim women’s rights? Well, from where I stand, personally, yes. And certainly for many Muslim women in France, the answer is the same. But this is because I am committed to a certain concept of a “right,” and one that systematically excludes others. More than that, my notion of right destroys other notions, insisting that their value is, politically speaking, nothing, or so little as not to need addressing.

This is not a bad thing. This is just how it is.  Note, however, that two games are being played at the same time in France, a non-zero-sum game (for French secularists) and a zero-sum game (for their opponents). The game goes on, despite their fundamental disagreements about its rules. Luckily, this disagreement does not just disappear. Instead, it remains important, and it conducted through politics, the struggle over the nature of the game.

And politics has distinct winners and losers. Not always, of course, but usually, and especially when dealing with things that really matter. Secularists will have to sacrifice something precious—a certain concept of citizenship—to grant the right that I feel is due to Muslim women, and they will not get anything in exchange.

Like Wright, then, I don’t have any hope for some final authority to determine how games are played between us and them. But also I have little hope that strong differences of value can be magically transformed into non-zero-sum games without loss and political conflict. “Rights,” “markets,” and the “rule of law,” just to name three, are not universal currencies. Rather, they are systems of value that aggressively challenge other ones. Realizing this—realizing what exactly we are asking people to give up to play our game—is, it seems to me, the real act of moral imagination that we face.

In another post, I want to take up explicitly the evolutionary model of religion, but this will have to do for now.

I agree with Wright that there’s a time and a place for “tossing out a hypothesis on the basis of little evidence and then letting people argue about it.” What is vital, though, is that in subsequent discussion the conjectural nature of the hypothesis is not forgotten. This is the trap that sociobiologists of yore all too often fell into: They offered a purely speculative hypothesis about the evolutionary history of some piece of human psychology (which is okay) and then proceeded to build all subsequent discussion on the assumption that the hypothesis is true (which is not okay). Thoughts of how the hypothesis might be tested were often far from their minds, leading Stephen Jay Gould to admonish them for creating a pseudo-science in which “virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance” (1978, “Sociobiology: The art of storytelling” New Scientist 80, p. 530).

In the present instance, Wright argues that there is solid evidence for the hypothesis that human psychology contains a mechanism for distinguishing non-zero-sum from zero-sum games and responding accordingly. He cites “a large empirical literature on reciprocal altruism” and also some primatological work. I am familiar with and impressed with much of this research, but I should like to urge caution in deciding just which hypothesis the data supports. In particular, I’d like to draw attention to the problem of identifying at which level of generality it is appropriate to describe the putative adaptive mechanism.

An imaginary example. Suppose we observe that in the course of its natural development a type of monkey will reliably manifest a fear of leopards. Noting that this fear seems to come on-line in advance of any learning from its kin or peers, we might think it reasonable to conclude that natural selection has endowed the monkey with an adaptive mechanism for dealing with this kind of threat. But what, precisely, is the “kind of threat” that the monkey needs to deal with? Does it have a mechanism devoted to fear of leopards, or is the mechanism devoted to fear of big cats, or perhaps devoted just to fear of predators, or maybe just large animate objects? It would be difficult to say without having more detailed data. If, for example, the monkey’s fear response is triggered not just by leopards but also by lions or tigers, but not by canines or bears, then it might be reasonable to call it a mechanism for dealing with big cats. If the response is triggered by leopards but not by lions or tigers, then it might be more reasonable to call it a mechanism designed to cope with leopards in particular. (That’s too quick, but you take my point.)

This observation problematizes Wright’s citation of evidence in support of his favored hypothesis. It may be granted (if only for the sake of argument) that human psychology contains a suite of mechanisms for dealing with certain kinds of interpersonal reciprocal relations. Perhaps we are designed for engaging in the trade of concrete goods, for example. Trade is a ubiquitous and truly ancient human practice, stretching back at least to the Upper Paleolithic, making it reasonable to suspect that the human brain comes with some design features dedicated to governing trade relations. A sense of distributive fairness in exchanges, emotions of anger at unfair exchanges, a sense of ownership (“This is mine and that is yours”) all might be expected to emerge in the course of the evolution of the human mind in order to enable and enhance trade. The few grand social experiments that have attempted to expunge the notion of ownership from the human psyche—such as in the Soviet Union or the kibbutzim of Israel—have encountered an extremely stubborn opponent, suggesting that these utopia-builders were up against a human trait entrenched by natural selection.

But then one faces the problem of how, precisely, to describe the mechanism. Assuming that there is an adaptive mechanism in play, is it devoted to governing trade of concrete goods or just trade (which may include exchange of favors, of information, of access to sexual partners, etc.)? Or perhaps we should describe the mechanism as devoted to reciprocity, or perhaps to non-zero-sum games. Leaping to the very last of these descriptions would be hasty—though it may be the correct conclusion to come to after careful consideration of the data. In short, the fact that humans may have an inbuilt mechanism for dealing with one kind of non-zero-sum game doesn’t mean that we have a mechanism designed to deal with non-zero-sum games in some general sense. Therefore I remain unconvinced that the empirical evidence at which Wright gestures in his response should be interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that the human mind contains a mechanism for distinguishing non-zero-sum from zero-sum games and responding accordingly.

In his reaction to Robert Wright’s thoughtful response, Jonathan Sheehan takes issue with Wright’s assumption that “all players are free to define gain for themselves.” I, too, will critique that assumption, though from a different angle.

The processes that prevent us from trying to achieve particular gains may also distort perceptions about available opportunities. This is because the very social pressures that keep us from acting in our perceived self-interest also discourage us from articulating accurate knowledge about our opportunities. Hence, the body of information that determines whether we recognize or overlook any particular opportunity emerges through interconnected individual decisions concerning what to say, write, share, and intimate. In relaxed environments the publicly available information about opportunities corresponds to the perceptions in our heads. In emotionally charged and politically repressive environments, much useful information remains private and, hence, inaccessible to others. This makes it difficult to think straight and to identify potential gains accurately.

Once again, the final years of the Soviet Bloc offer a striking illustration. Prior to Gorbachev’s reforms of 1985 informed citizens of the Soviet Bloc refrained from criticizing official economic policies, for fear of reprisals. They also refrained from publicizing the gains achievable through privatization and liberalization. Under the circumstances, the majority of the population believed that communism offered a better future than capitalism. Once Gorbachev’s restructuring (perestroika) and openness (glasnost) campaigns got under way, people already conscious of the prevailing inefficiencies took to speaking their minds in increasing numbers. In the process, awareness of the advantages of reforms started to spread. Thus, two dramatic transformations unfolded in tandem: a meteoric rise in awareness of the potential gains from reforms and a vast expansion of public discourses pointing to those gains. Each transformation reinforced the other.

Why is this history relevant to the present challenge of improving Muslim-Western relations? Like Soviet Bloc players of the past, those engaged in present struggles over Muslim-Western relations “define gain” through interactions with others.  A Pakistani growing up in a Taliban-dominated region does not form his opinions about the costs and benefits of local policy options freely, or by himself. Likewise, the Christian who believes that a “zero-sum” religious war is under way does not learn about Islam in isolation from others. What these adversaries read, hear, investigate, and discuss is constrained by their respective social environments. Each is bombarded with information selected to support a particular perception of what is right and beneficial. And each is surrounded by people who are reluctant to question dominant opinions. Thus, where ignorance about the potential gains from Muslim-Western cooperation is widespread, a major reason is that information consistent with those gains is getting filtered out of critical public discourses.

Ignorance and misperception are hardly the preserves of the pious or the poorly educated. In rich countries many secular and well-educated people believe earnestly that agricultural subsidies protect the family farm; in fact, the benefits go overwhelmingly to huge corporations whose shareholders live mostly in cities. Many Western misperceptions about Islam and Islamic history, like Muslim misperceptions about the West, are shared by privileged elites.

These observations do not diminish the importance of publicizing the commonness of mutually beneficial interactions, in other words, of interactions with a positive-sum outcome. They do reinforce my earlier point that to reduce global tensions we must weaken the political coalitions that benefit from those tensions. Policies that split and weaken groups promoting a Huntingtonian clash of civilizations, such as the Taliban and Christian churches hostile to Islam, make it easier for individuals to pursue potential gains that they already know about. They also facilitate learning about the enormous advantages of peaceful coexistence, trade, and cooperation.

Thanks to all three of you for your latest round of feedback.

So far we haven’t spent much time on what I view as the heart of my essay, and I’m wondering if I can lure you three into an introspective thought experiment that bears directly on it.

First, a recap: I argued that when we perceive people in zero-sum terms (e.g., as enemies), our mind naturally impedes clear comprehension of their motivations—especially the motivations behind behaviors we find particularly objectionable. Thus, we have trouble “putting ourselves in the shoes” of terrorists and so shedding light on the causes of terrorism, even though understanding those causes might be in our interest.

I haven’t yet won any of you over to this thesis, so, in a last-ditch effort, I’d like to see if a little introspection could make you more sympathetic to it. And, assuming this effort fails in that regard, maybe your reactions will help clarify exactly where most of the resistance lies.

OK, here’s the thought experiment:

Scenario 1: First, imagine yourself in the kind of zero-sum game that scholars sometimes find themselves in—a relationship with a scholar whose theories are fundamentally incompatible with your own. To the extent that his/her theories gain followers, your own stature within academia suffers. Imagine that the debate between you has gotten prominent and intense. And imagine that you both have your eyes on a single tenured position at a particularly prestigious university.

Scenario 2: Now imagine yourself in a highly non-zero-sum relationship—with, say, a junior scholar who shares your views and spends his/her time singing your praises and pointing to the flaws in the thinking of the rival described in Scenario 1.

Tell me if these seem like outlandish conjectures:

(1) In thinking about the rival, your mind fastens onto unflattering features more readily than flattering features, and in the case of your ally this pattern is reversed. Thus if you learn that, coincidentally, both your rival and your ally (a) last year donated $1,000 to help feed the poor and (b) once cheated on a final exam, you’re more likely to remember and repeat (a) in the case of your ally than in the case of your rival.

(2) In pondering the cheating incident, you’ll be more receptive to exonerating information (e.g. extenuating circumstances) in the case of the ally than in the case of the rival. In particular, you more readily relate your own experience to the ally’s experience—e.g., you compare the temptations that overwhelmed the ally to temptations that you yourself have succumbed to in the past.

I guess it doesn’t speak highly of me that my own introspection renders these conjectures plausible. And maybe the three of you are made of better stuff. Anyway, I’d appreciate it if you could look deep within your souls and tell me what you find.

Robert Wright asks us to reflect on whether we notice a professional rival’s flaws more readily than we notice those of an ally. In presenting the scenario he characterizes the relationship with the rival as zero-sum and that with the ally as non-zero-sum.

Various psychological mechanisms make us particularly receptive to evidence of blemishes in a rival’s record and of virtue in the record of an ally. I may well ascribe unflattering motivations to a professional rival more readily than to a colleague who shares my own academic tastes, interests, and methodological orientation. But do the biases in question stem solely from cognitive distortions? There are also social processes at work, and in practice they may be relatively more significant.

The books and articles that I read will tend to praise the writings of my ally and to criticize those of my rival. Likewise, the people who give talks at seminars that I organize, or choose to attend, are more likely to think highly of my ally’s works than of my rival’s writings. For these reasons, information favorable to my ally is relatively more available to me. The same is true of information about my rival’s failures and dark motivations.

The bias that Wright mentions is undoubtedly pervasive. My point here is that it has an important social component that may work independently of the psychological mechanisms in question.

Am I likely to see the relationship with my rival as a zero-sum contest? Not necessarily. I might see it as a negative-sum struggle involving much wasted energy on both sides. Alternatively, I might view the relationship as a positive-sum contest that makes each of us think harder and write better in anticipation of possible criticisms from the other side. Wright’s scenario appears realistic, then, only in a probabilistic sense: a rivalry is more likely than a cooperative relationship to appear zero-sum.

Adam Smith once commented that people, “though naturally sympathetic, feel little for another, with whom they have no particular connection, in comparison of what they feel for themselves.” He was onto something there.  No doubt, as Wright suggests, it is much more difficult to think sympathetically about scholar A, whose theories and ambitions recklessly threaten my own and, than scholar B, the charming protégé.

So I agree entirely that it is easier to put up with even bad behavior from those who seem to offer more in benefits than in costs. More significantly–for Wright and for myself–I also agree that relationships of mutual exchange (of ideas, of values, even of currency) can expand the compass of the moral imagination.

Events in Iran these past few days have, I think, accomplished something like this for Americans. Fears of a nuclear Middle East have been overshadowed, in our minds (or in mine anyway), by the incredible bravery of Iranian men and women confronting the brutality of a police state. I can imagine myself in their shoes, and even things that might have seemed alien before–the nightly chants of “God is great” from the rooftops–are suddenly made sympathetic and moving.

My concerns are not, then, about these dynamics of sympathy and antipathy. Rather, like Timur Kuran, I am concerned about how we extrapolate beyond psychological mechanisms, either to the social world (in Kuran’s response) or to the political one (in my own).

For it seems to me that compassion easily becomes absorption. It becomes a way to frame one’s pragmatic interests as if they were the interests of another. Few histories testify more clearly to this than the histories of religion, where extension of the “we” has, more often than not, played a powerfully aggressive role.

Christians have been trying to compassionately absorb the Jews for millennia, for example, and they are still doing it today. The Jew cannot simply ask the Christian to give up on conversion, however, as if this would be an easy thing. Conversion is something essential to the Christian project, and giving it up would be a major sacrifice, a major blow the self-interest of the Christian.

Instead Jews have endlessly struggled against this deadly compassion. And this struggle–this insistence that what the Christian sees as a good (conversion), the Jew sees as an affliction–is more than psychological. It is political, and importantly so.

I’d like, then, to put this question to Wright: how does the game theory model accommodate politics, and especially the politics that attend real divergences in worldview and even existential needs? When something important must be sacrificed to reach agreement with another, in other words, what does the gaming model have to offer? Does it teach us how we should make difficult moral and political choices, or does it rather (as I confess that I suspect) tend to hide these choices behind appealing but thin façades of mutual interest?

All sorts of things can affect one’s tendency to like or dislike other individuals. Some are unexpected. A subliminal hint of lemon odor can influence one’s evaluation of a stranger’s likeability (Li et al. 2007). Inducing a feeling of disgust–by placing a dirty kleenex nearby, for example—can boost the severity of a negative moral judgment (Schnall et al. 2008a). Allowing a disgusted individual to wash her hands will prompt her to tone down her negative moral assessment (Schnall et al. 2008b). A person’s evaluation of stimuli can even be influenced by whether he is encouraged to press down with his hands on a table top at which he is sitting or pull up on its underside (Cacioppo et al. 1993).

Other influences on our interpersonal likes and dislikes are far more obvious. If a person is threatening to harm me, or is actually intentionally harming me, then I’ll likely form a negative image of him or her. If the person is promising to act in ways that improve my welfare, or is actually intentionally acting in such ways, then I’ll likely form a positive image of him or her. This seems so obvious that one doesn’t need to cite psychology literature to back it up. And if convincing us of this truism is “the heart” of Wright’s essay, then he certainly won’t meet any resistance from this quarter.

The issue is the extent to which Wright takes this truism and tries to draw more substantial conclusions from it. One concern I have regards the role of intentionality in our attitudes towards other individuals (or groups). If X is out to harm me intentionally then I’ll likely form a negative image of X; but if X hurts me by accident then I’ll be much more forgiving. Now, something important to note about zero-sum games versus non-zero-sum games is that intentionality has nothing to do with it. Even insects and plants can play these games with each other. So long as two parties both have interests and can causally affect each other’s interests, then the possibility of a game is on. The parties do not have to encounter each other spatially or even be aware of each other’s existence: If a nocturnal insect and a diurnal insect are competing for the same foodstuff, then they are playing a zero-sum game.

We can imagine scenarios where intentions and outcomes come apart. Well-intentioned aid packages sent to distant lands can end up in the hands of corrupt local warlords, who are thereby bolstered in their capacity to victimize those very individuals whose interests the charity was supposed to advance. Similarly, someone who seeks to harm another through spreading malicious rumors, say, may end up prompting sympathy for the subject of the gossip in a manner that actually ends up benefiting him or her. Putting this in more abstract form: Sometimes two parties intend to play a zero-sum game but end up playing a non-zero-sum game, and sometimes vice versa.

An interesting question to ask is: When intentions and outcomes come apart, where do our sympathies and antipathies lie? I hazard to suggest that the answer is that they generally go along with intentions.

If I hear that some distant person’s actions are harming my welfare then I naturally won’t be too pleased; but if I learn, further, that this occurs only through a complex causal chain of which this person is ignorant—if I learn that in fact this distant person thinks quite well of me and intends me good things—then my attitude won’t suffer the distortions and failures of imagination of which Wright speaks. In other words, it is not the belief that I am in a zero-sum game with X that causes the failure of “moral imagination,” it is the belief that X intends me harm—a belief that I may have even while knowing that I am in fact playing a non-zero-sum game with X. By symmetrical reasoning: If I believe that some person Y is really out to get me, but in fact Y’s actions are inadvertently benefiting me, then this may be sufficient for me to consider Y an “enemy” and have the usual range of hostile attitudes towards him. (Of course, I will also be pleased about the benefits that I am accruing through his actions, and probably consider Y not only an enemy but also an idiot for failing to see that I profit from his hostility.) In other words, it is not the belief that I am in a non-zero-sum game with Y that causes the expansion of my “moral imagination,” it is the belief that Y intends to act for my benefit—a belief that I may have even while knowing that I am in fact playing a zero-sum game with Y.

Another point to which I would like to draw attention is an apparent assumption of asymmetry in Wright’s argument. When we believe ourselves to be engaged in a zero-sum game, Wright claims, “our mind naturally impedes clear comprehension of [our interactant’s] motivations.” The detection of zero-sumness apparently distorts perception and blocks accuracy. But why is the same point not made of our attitudes towards non-zero-sumness? When we form a flattering image of an ally—when we choose to overlook his past misdemeanors, for example–why is this not equally a kind of distortion, a kind of inaccuracy in our thinking? Why is my unflattering portrayal of my enemies any less true to reality than my flattering portrayal of my allies?

Wright may respond that both attitudes are symmetrically inaccurate, but that one kind of inaccuracy is benign and the other pernicious. Our unflattering inaccuracy with respect to our enemies stands in the way of understanding, and a lack of understanding of enemies is a pragmatically bad idea. (How much more effectively we could defeat them if we could understand them!) By comparison, our flattering inaccuracy with respect to our allies may also stand in the way of true understanding, but no great harm ensues. After all, our allies are, by definition, not seeking our harm.

However, if I understand Wright correctly, he is not advocating that we extend our moral imagination to our real enemies; he is not arguing in his essay that we should overturn our unflattering and understanding-hindering antipathy towards terrorists. Rather, his point is that we have been sucked into interpreting people who are in fact allies as enemies. Wright’s central claim is that we should overturn the distorting influence of unflattering antipathy towards that vast majority of Muslims who are in fact not our enemies at all.

I wonder, again, if the point is supposed to be symmetrical. Suppose that instead of having been misled by the media into thinking that a group of friends is really our enemy, we have been misled by the media into thinking that a group of enemies is really our ally. If our (supposed) evolved mechanisms have kicked in to provide us with a distortedly flattering view of the virtues of these people, then by parity of reasoning we should strive to rein in our moral imagination; we should overturn the distorting influence of flattering sympathy towards these individuals who are in fact not our allies at all.

Well, the thoughts expressed in both the last two paragraphs seem plausible enough. Who could deny the platitude that we should see our friends as friends and our enemies as enemies (and cats as cats and dogs as dogs)? And note that the pragmatic asymmetry has disappeared: Neither kind of inaccurate thought could be claimed to be benign. Seeing our friends as enemies (which is Wright’s concern) deprives us of understanding that could be enormously useful. But seeing our enemies as friends is, if anything, even more dangerous.

I should like to close with a fairly obvious thought, but it seems to me an important one. Remember that the notions of “friend” and “enemy” that are relevant here are to be defined in game theoretical terms: based not on the intentions of the parties in question but on whether they stand to benefit or suffer from the other’s pursuit of its interests. The worry is that any claim of the form “We in the West stand to benefit/suffer from Muslims pursuing their own interests” is just far too simplistic to warrant endorsement. The idea these two complex, sprawling, nebulous entities are playing one grand game is a highly doubtful proposition–even allowing for a dose of idealization. They are playing a myriad of games at many levels: numerous non-zero-sum games (that are potentially zero-sum games), many zero-sum games (that are potentially non-zero-sum games). The globalized economy ensures that the costs and benefits traded among nations and cultures is of a magnitude of complexity that challenges (and in all probability defies) comprehension. Merely drawing our attention to one interaction that appears to be non-zero-sum (that “what’s good for Muslims broadly is bad for radical Muslims … [making the West] more secure from terrorism”)—an interaction, moreover, that appears more potential than actual, since Wright’s principal complaint is that the West is not acting in a way that’s “good for Muslims”—is insufficient evidence that the relation between these two parties is in general characterized by non-zero-sumness.

References

Cacioppo, J.T., et al. 1993. “Rudimentary determination of attitudes: II. Arm flexion and extension have differential effects on attitudes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65: 5-17.

Li, W., et al. 2007. “Subliminal smells can guide social preferences.” Psychological Science 18: 1044-1049.

Schnall, S., et al. 2008a. “Disgust as embodied moral judgment.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34: 1096-1109.

Schnall, S., et al. 2008b. “With a clean conscience: Cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgment.” Psychological Science 19: 1219-1222.

Thanks yet again to all three respondents for a stimulating discussion. I’m sure my closing comments won’t do justice to your closing contributions, but I’ll try to respond to the most salient points.

I’m delighted to hear Richard Joyce agree that we all tend to form a negative image of threatening people and a positive image of people who might benefit us. I’d of course put a finer point on it: The “negative” or “positive” image formation involves subtle value judgments that (a) we’re often not aware of; and (b) may be unrelated to the nature of the threat or the benefit. Thus, we may negatively judge the clothing style or taste in music of someone who competes with us for a job—and may be unaware that these judgments are a function of the perceived threat.

And please note that the related argument I make in The Evolution of God goes well beyond this simple and (as Joyce suggests) fairly obvious fact about human psychology. That argument is twofold:

(1) These simple biases of judgment account for many of the belligerent and tolerant passages in the scripture of all three Abrahamic religions. And this in turn tells us something about how we might bring out the best and worst in religions today.

(2) These simple biases of judgment may impede comprehension of the forces that motivate our enemies.

And here I’d like to correct Joyce’s interpretation of me: “If I understand Wright correctly, he is not advocating that we extend our moral imagination to our real enemies; he is not arguing in his essay that we should overturn our unflattering and understanding-hindering antipathy towards terrorists.”  Actually, I’m arguing exactly that (among other things). I think it’s in our interest to understand what circumstances created these terrorists—not so that we can then change circumstances to moderate their behavior (unlikely) but so that we can change circumstances in a way that reduces the chances that others who are now moderate will follow in their footsteps and become terrorists.

Joyce raises the interesting question of why I depict our unflattering view of enemies as more of a distortion than our flattering view of allies: “When we form a flattering image of an ally—when we choose to overlook his past misdemeanors, for example—why is this not equally a kind of distortion, a kind of inaccuracy in our thinking?” The answer is that I’m not talking about the moral judgment we render (e.g., whether we deem a given behavior a transgression) but rather about the cognitive process that biases us toward a given moral judgment. Our favorable moral judgments tend to be facilitated by successfully “putting ourselves in the shoes” of a given person-recalling feelings we’ve had (e.g., a sense of grievance at being disrespected) that are in fact comparable to the feelings that in this person motivated acts that might otherwise be deemed inexcusable. Our unfavorable moral judgments tend to be facilitated by denying such comparisons even when they exist. This isn’t an absolute pattern, but I maintain that it applies often enough so that we can say that on balance our views of the motivations of allies are literally truer than our views of the motivations of enemies. (Note that I’m confining the analysis to “misdeeds”—cases where the behavior to be explained is one that, in the absence of an exculpating motivation, would be deemed bad.)

As for what Joyce thought I was saying-that our favorable moral judgments of allies tend to be less distorted than our unfavorable moral judgments of enemies: I can see how this might seem implicit in the asymmetry I see in the cognitive processes leading to moral judgment. But in fact I have a somewhat different view, as suggested in an elaborative footnote to my chapter on the moral imagination. This quote from the footnote captures my sense that when it comes to moral judgments our skepticism should fall symmetrically on our views of enemies and allies:

Our moral judgments feel as if they’re evaluating the past in light of moral truth, but they were actually designed by natural selection to serve our future in light of strategic calculation. We unconsciously assess our zero-sum and non-zero-sum relationships, unconsciously decide whether payment will serve self-interest, and then our inner accountant generates the moral judgments that will justify the payment, or not… In this view, the moral imagination subordinates the truth about the actual moral facts to the larger goal of navigating the landscape of zero-sum and non-zero-sum relationships. It shrinks or expands in response to judgments about whether a relationship is auspicious and, if so, on what terms. Our ensuing convictions about who is to blame and who isn’t to blame are self-serving illusions.

Now for some quick and, perhaps, concise-to-the-point-of-cryptic reactions:

(1) I agree with Jonathan Sheehan that compassion can be carried too far (though, strictly speaking, I’m less interested in abetting compassion than in abetting its frequent corollary, a kind of empathetic illumination of the motivations behind acts).

(2) I agree with Timur Kuran that social factors outside of the core cognitive tendency I focus on can reinforce the bias I describe. (And, more broadly, I concur with all three respondents that things are invariably very complicated in the real world and that any game theoretical rendering-certainly including mine-will be an oversimplification. But there is such a thing as fruitful oversimplification.)

(3) Richard Joyce emphasizes the importance of intentionality, as distinct from the zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum distinction, saying that the former may have “nothing to do” with the latter. He writes: “If X is out to harm me intentionally then I’ll likely form a negative image of X; but if X hurts me by accident then I’ll be much more forgiving.” Yes, but I submit that the (Darwinian) reason we make this distinction is because intentional harm is an indicator of likely future zero-sum interaction with the person, whereas accidental harm is not. So the “negative image” and the forgiveness are appropriate responses to proxies for, respectively, zero-sum and non-zero-sum (or perhaps not-zero-sum) interaction.

I can hear Professor Joyce demanding that I corroborate this rank conjecture about the Darwinian logic underlying this reaction. Maybe another time. Right now all I have time to do is thank all three of you again.