What Plato got wrong about human nature, and what would Charlie Chaplin do?

Charlie Chaplin gave a goosebump-inducing speech when he declared, “Our knowledge has made us cynical; Our cleverness, hard and unkind; We think too much, and feel too little; More than machinery, we need humanity; More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness; Without these qualities, life will be violent, and all will be lost.”

Surely then, the world needs more empathy, right? He also said, “Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.” So, do we need more reason or more emotion and empathy? Does it necessarily have to be one or the other?

Western philosophy has emphasized reason and logic over emotions for thousands of years. For all its wondrous gifts in science, the Renaissance movement and the Enlightenment led to rising individualism. You could even argue it tried to place reason over emotions. After all, with a renewed interest in ancient greek philosophy, the metaphor of Plato began to dominate. Plato paints the picture of a charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses: First, the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly, one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case, driving is necessarily complex and troublesome. 
The charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature; while the other represents the soul’s irrational passions and appetites. The charioteer directs the entire chariot/soul to stop the horses from going different ways and proceed towards Enlightenment. Well, indeed, according to this metaphor, we can reason our way out of our passions. But does this hold up under scrutiny in the real world? More on this later.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings and situations which another person is going through. But how reliable a guide is empathy when we let it be our moral compass. Many confuse empathy (feeling with someone) with sympathy (feeling sorry for someone), and even researchers who study it have muddied the waters with many definitions. Empathy and compassion are very different — different areas of the brain light up when experiencing them. With empathy, we join the suffering of others(by activation of mirror neurons) but stop short of actually helping. With compassion, we take a step away from the emotion of empathy and ask ourselves, ‘how can we help?’
Emotional empathy differs from cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand a person’s emotional state without feeling it yourself. Psychologists are often asked to inhabit the realm of cognitive empathy and not emotional empathy. This is because, as an example, anxious patients look for calm and non-anxious psychologists. If the psychologists feel anxiety, then it becomes difficult for them to help the patient. Cognitive empathy is also what con artists and bullies use to understand the victim’s weaknesses and exploit them.

Mr. Chaplin proclaimed,

“Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.”

In today’s world, growth is an intrinsic goal of progress. Some like Kate Raworth argue that eternal growth is in itself an insidious goal for a planetary system with limited resources. But does today’s world have this explicit goal to let science and progress lead to humanity’s happiness? What is the compass that the world uses to decide which direction to take?

At an individual level, many would argue it is morality that guides our decision-making. But is morality guided by reason or emotions? Morality refers to the set of standards that enable people to live cooperatively in groups. It’s what societies determine to be “right” and “acceptable.” We are products of evolution. Some innate(structured in advance of experience) things are built into us to help us navigate the social world. For kids worldwide, if someone hits you, then most of the kids hit them back. This reciprocity is innate. Even infants who have not developed a capacity for reason show morality. In one experiment, experimenters showed 6–10 months old infants a puppet show with two puppets: a nice one and a mean one. After watching the show, most infants preferred the good puppet. The experiment demonstrates that morality is prompted by intuitions rather than reason as infants are too young to have developed brain and executive functions.
Like we have taste buds for sweet, sour, and umami, Jonathan Haidt, in The righteous mind, argues that we all innately have moral taste buds that correspond(as an example, one taste bud that corresponds to harm/care) to the palate of morality. In this example, just like kids like sweets, they are innately predisposed to activities that kindle their ‘care’ taste buds instead of ‘harm’ taste buds.
However, it is not all hard-wired. Evolution in people is quite flexible, and culture shapes us to develop specific capacities more than others. In a way, we are predisposed but not predestined. This is where cross-cultural analysis leads to fascinating results. Morality across non-western societies care greatly about purity and pollution- how to treat a menstruating woman, different foods purportedly have other properties, what to do with corpses, etc.

Western culture thinks it in terms of hygiene; western cultures are exceptions when compared against most cultures in the world in terms of the layers of moral palettes used. Jonathan Haidt defines people from WEIRD(Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic countries) as WEIRDos in shorthand. WEIRD is an acronym, not an insult. Even in visual perception,WEIRDos see things more as individual objects. The rest of the world considers the world to be more connected. If you show a pic with a school of swimming fishes, WEIRDos see the lead fish, whereas East Asians look at all the fishes and even notice the background, which WEIRDos do not see.

Intuitive moral judgments based on emotions are far more potent to adults than rational reasoning. Intuitions come first and rationality second. Plato gave the metaphor of charioteer and the horses, but the evidence doesn’t support it. People act on motivated reasoning and find evidence to support their conclusion. Once that initial moral judgment has been made, we use reasoning to back it up, not reject, the judgment. Haidt has modified the metaphor to that of the elephant and the rider. Haidt’s analogy shows that the rider is rational and can therefore see a path ahead, while underneath him, the elephant provides the power for the journey. However, the elephant is irrational and driven by emotion and instinct. If you’re familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, you might also call these System One and System Two.

“Perched atop the elephant, the rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the rider’s control is precarious because the rider is so small relative to the elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the rider will lose. He’s completely overmatched.”

According to Haidt, everyone has the following three moral taste buds:
1. Care vs. Harm
2. Fairness vs. Cheating (“if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”; Proportionality)
3. Liberty vs. Oppression(We all resent bullying alpha males, the left sometimes considers the corporation to be the bully )
The three moral taste buds that are less common amongst the political left:
4. Authority vs. subversion(“You shouldn’t do back talk to an authority figure in the family”)
5. Loyalty vs. Betrayal (“Blood is thicker than water”)
6. Sanctity vs. Degradation (“your body may be a temple, but mine is a playground”; this is where the topic of Abortion is a topic of debate between the right and the left)

Morality with its distinct taste buds serve a seminal purpose- it binds people together. Morality, along with language, has given the miracle of human civilization. No other species can cooperate unless they are siblings(bees, naked mole rats). Humans are the only species that cooperate, even amongst strangers. Morality serves a social function and allows us to collaborate.
Morality is almost an emergentist phenomenon. Moral truths are like truths of the market. Is gold intrinsically more valuable than silver? Would aliens coming to earth agree that gold is more valuable than silver? Not all phenomenon that gives rise to spontaneous order are virtuous (i.e., Slavery, Concentration camps during WWII). What we gain in cohesion we often lose in open-mindedness. Morality gives us passionate sports teams, patriotism, and corporations (a body composed of other bodies), but it can also lead us to war and genocide. We become closed off and allow for slavery and authoritarian regimes to take power. This is precisely what Charlie Chaplin was warning us against in his speech.

Regarding whether we should let emotions and empathy be our moral compass, Paul Bloom cautions against that since studies have shown that empathy can depend on whether a person is considered “us” or “them.” Researcher Grit Hein gathered a group of male soccer fans, fans of the same team and some rival teams. Each participant would receive an electric shock to their hands and then witness another person receive the same shock. If the other person was a fan of the same team, the subject’s neural response showed empathy, but the response revealed significantly less compassion when a rival team fan was shocked. We are biased individuals with preferences towards people of our race and background. Even in the imagination of a post-racial world ‘The Expanse’ people from Earth, Mars, and the Belt fight one another. They only are able to extend their empathic sphere of influence out only onto the planet(or the asteroid belt in the case of the belters), not even towards the solar system. So much for the ideal universalism of a post-racial and post-money world of Star Trek Voyager. The expanse shows a much more pragmatic reality that besieges humanity if we do venture outwards in the next few centuries. Even in Interstellar(Spoilers ahead), when Dr. Mann reveals the Plan B to save humanity from extinction he exclaims :

You never would have come here unless you believed you were going to save them. Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier. We can care deeply — selflessly — about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.

Popular opinion suggests that empathy is a tool that can cure the world of all the hate and prejudices that are tearing it apart. In reality, empathy can be a problematic characteristic that causes us to make irrational decisions that can hurt more people than it can help.

It does seem that David Hume was more on the money when he said

“Reason is the slave of the passion.”

We can conclude individual reasoning is flawed. But if you put us together in groups in the right way, human beings can correct each other’s motivated reasoning and produce rational behavior. This is why science works so well. This also is why narrative reviews are excellent at catching one another’s blind spots in a business environment. We are good at disproving others but are not good at being critical of ourselves. So, let us put that to use for the betterment of human society as a whole.

Now, armed with empathy, while knowing its limits, let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all human beings’ happiness. Hopefully, Charlie Chaplin will approve of this message.