Urbanization and Transcendental Morality

by Jefferson Hansen

The primatologist Frans de Waal in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton Science Library) argues that the seeds of human morality can be found in other primates. He believes that there is a distinct continuity between primate moral behavior and human morality. He does not believe we are as special as we sometimes think.

Here is not the place to go into the specifics of de Waal's argument, other than to say that the past several decades of biological research has shown, repeatedly, that other animals are more like us than we may have previously thought. For instance, I recently learned from a 60 Minutes story that even dogs pick up on human language and can learn to order their behavior on the basis of actual human words.

Here, I am interested in the impact of urbanization on notions of morality. If we follow de Waal, then morality is derived from the affects, from the way we feel about those around us. I find this convincing. For most of our evolution, we probably lived in small, fairly contained groups. Morality stemmed from the ways this group remained cohesive and therefore adaptive to the environment. People in the group often chose to treat each other well because it helped the group as a whole survive. When group members cooperated, generally the group as a whole became more environmentally fit.

I think it is reasonable to assume that we evolved to live in small, cohesive groups that defended against threats in the form of other human groups, other animals, or even nonconformist members. These threats were to be eliminated or at least controlled. When a group senses a threat from within, the results can be gruesome. The Salem Witch Trials are an extreme example.

Morality begins in the feelings human beings have for other group members. We nurture each other, groom each other, help each other through difficult times, insist on and enforce some degree of fairness and reciprocity. We also feel jealousy, anger, frustration, and unfairness. Morality is the playing out of these feelings, the negotiation and tussle as a group negotiates members' dynamic affects.

What happens, we must ask, when the anonymity of mass urbanization robs us of these feelings because most of the people around us are strangers? Here is where transcendental morality becomes necessary. In such a situation, we need to base our morality on a cognitive and rational notion of humanity and human rights rather than on our feelings for one another. Indeed, Kant argues that helping a relative is a morally neutral act becomes it stems, in part, from affection. True moral acts proceed from a notion of universal humanity: helping a complete stranger is a morally good act because no feelings taint it.

For Kant to even come up with this idea, the whole notion of in-group strangers must exist. This sort of cognitive-based, rationalist morality can only occur in a society where all the members do not know each other. It is a result of urbanization.

The consequences that follow from this claim are profound. It means that we developed transcendental morality as a response to something very late in evolution. We needed to figure out a way to create a morality to complement the more primal one that is based on emotions and affection, a morality to create cohesion among strangers.

de Waal spends a lot of time critiquing the notion that we are, at base, selfish and brutish and that civilization places a veneer of goodness on us. I believe this critique. But I speculate that the brutishness being described results not from "natural" humans—for I believe that "natural" humans are radically group creatures—but from the cruelty that can arise when we live amid strangers. Our most natural morality, that based on affection for those we know, makes us suspicious of others, of strangers, of those who are different.

In other words, urbanization creates the selfish individual, not nature. Once created, this selfishness must be controlled. Hence, the need for depersonalized transcendental morality. How else can we control the behavior of people who don't know each other?

The cognitive and the rational is, however, much smaller than the affective and emotional. Indeed, opposing them may even be a mistake: the rational may emerge from the affective. However, I believe the distinction is useful, in this instance, because it shows how weak the urban morality is, as it is based on only a very small part of our humanity. The more primal, group-based morality takes in the complexity of primal emotions. I believe these emotions determine more of our behavior than rational principles grounded in a notion of transcendence.

This means that we urbanized human beings are always at war with ourselves, pulled between, on the one hand, primal emotions for those closest to us and, on the other, the demands of depersonalized, transcendent morality. To make our society work we need, in formal and legal ways, to emphasize the latter. But it is not what we most basically are. Civilized rationality is not a veneer that covers the cruelty at the base of human nature. Rather, it protects civilization from its own creation—namely, the selfish, lone individual.