Born sick

The good and the true

The Great Gender Divergence by Alice Evans contains many matter-of-fact portraits of a kind of evil that I find especially poignant. Consider the story of Amal and Mubashir, a couple in Karachi who married for love but had that love choked off when Mubashir’s mother tried to prevent them from getting close. He listened:

Amal was bright, bubbly and craved independence: she wanted to play music, watch TV and go on fun trips. The standard donor intervention might be ‘income-generating activities’ or ‘female empowerment’. But that would be a gross misdiagnosis. Amal actually earned a decent salary - working as a senior administrator.

Amal’s biggest problem was in the home. Since she was barely permitted to spend any time with Mubashir, their marital bond remained weak. Tight restrictions inhibited love, empathy, consideration and understanding.

Mubashir’s prior affinity was to his mother and male peers. He valued their judgement and sought their approval. Fraternal solidarity persisted. When Amal rebelled against these strictures, he beat her to ensure submission and maintain status. Mubashir’s violence was highly strategic — designed to terrify, but not totally incapacitate. Amal’s bruises and broken bones hardly counted.

Amal wanted affection, so when Mubashir came to her room she would deny sex as a form of rebellion. But since he did not value her welfare, this just resulted in rape.

Chinese laws and norms on domestic abuse, past and present:

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the criminal code punished a woman who escaped her husband with a hundred lashes.

When divorce rights were introduced in the Republican era (1915), women rushed to escape abuse. Legal cases attest to wives being beaten with clubs, shackled in chains and starved. Yet even in this era of reform, over 50% of female-initiated requests for divorce were refused. Some judges actively encouraged men to coercively enforce submission. “If she is not obedient, you can beat her to death. I will protect you” - assured a Shandong judge.

In 1950, the Communist Party introduced divorce rights. This triggered violent backlash. Men accustomed to total control stamped out female insubordination. Over 80,000 women died, every year from 1950 to 1953. Bingsheng Zhao from Shanxi Province reacted to his wife’s request for divorce by inserting a red hot iron into her a vagina, causing death. Other men slit their wives’ throats.

In most places and times in human history, what we would call spousal abuse was normative. In many places today, it still is.

As a little girl, I grew up on the founding myths of a culture that glorified burning women alive for mens’ egos. Rama, explicitly hailed (unlike those other nine incarnations) as a role model for the ideal man,¹ orders his wife to walk into a pyre because his morally-righteous subjects suspected that when she was kidnapped by a rival warlord, she may also have been raped. She is so pure, the fire does not hurt her.²

My jaw clenches as I think of the countless unnamed women dragged screaming and sobbing to the flames, told it was a test and if they experienced an agonizing death that’s their own fault, they weren’t pure enough.

Growing up, I knew some men in our extended family and community would sometimes hit their wives and kids. My dad was a kind man, but we didn’t particularly distance ourselves from others who weren’t so kind.³ Their behavior was not exactly considered good, but I now move in circles where it would be far less thinkable.

My cousins had to cloister themselves when they got their period — one time as a kid I hugged an “unclean one” as a deliberate act of rebellion, but I didn’t stick the landing since I was forced to bathe afterward. As a teen, the Indian boys my age would talk about wanting wives who were just like their moms, so good at cooking and cleaning for them.⁴

My parents were reasonable people, and progressive for their background. They certainly would not endorse sati if you ask them. But I don’t think they quite understood or appreciated my seething fury, my contempt for the culture of their birth, the fact that I considered myself to be in open war against everything it stood for.

In my adult life, I’m honored to know probably some of the kindest men to have ever lived so far.⁵ Men who give a lot of themselves to help others far away, even when it was ridiculed and hurt their relationships and limited their personal comfort, even when it cost them pieces of their soul. Men who are principled egalitarians and huge wife guys and gentle fathers to young daughters who are going to grow up to be among the tiny fraction of young women in human history who never knew a reality where variously benevolent or cruel patriarchs ruled over variously meek or defiant wives. (How I’d like to look at the world out of their eyes!⁶)

And yet. I wonder what they would do if they were born in an honor culture, and they caught their daughter leaving the house without a chaperone. If their wife was exhausted and in postpartum pain, but they were born in a culture without the concept of marital rape.

Wifebeating is just one manifestation of ancient evil that happens to be salient to me. If I were born in other times and places, I would have abused my children. I might have owned slaves. I might have cheered for wars of conquest and extermination.

I’ve always wanted badly to be Good, to always do the Right Thing and thus earn a pat on the head from God.⁷ But my whole notion of goodness is a contingent thing, and in another environment, this same innate impulse to conform to the norms around me would lead me to fervently uphold Evil.

We command ourselves to be well

In a real sense, it’s nonsensical to imagine what “we” would do if we were born in a vastly different time and place. It would simply not be us. Sometimes I feel like compassionate, egalitarian Western culture is a wonderful parasite that has colonized our nasty brutish brains, and at this point we are more parasite than host (and good riddance).

But of course it’s a peculiar kind of parasite, constructed by its own hosts, bit by bit, through centuries of accumulated choices. I would love to more deeply understand how we moved from there to here, what individual steps we took and why we took them.

The obvious deflationary story that floats around the rationalist memespace is that the fairness and gentleness of modern Western civilization is simply a function of its wealth and technology level. For example, Scott Alexander in 2016:

“[W]estern medicine” is just medicine that works. It happens to be western because the West had a technological head start, and so discovered most of the medicine that works first….[Western] gender norms…sprung up in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and its turbulent intermixing of the domestic and public economies. They arose because they worked. The West was the first region to industrialize and realize those were the gender norms that worked for industrial societies, and as China and Arabia industrialize they’re going to find the same thing.

I think there’s a lot to the deflationary story, and it’s very important. If everyone shared my proclivities, the exact mechanics of the relationship between wealth, technology, and civilizational values would have been one of the biggest subjects of study in academic history and economics and sociology over the last century, and every schoolkid would be taught the broad contours of the findings.

But I don’t think it’s the whole story. I think of industrialization and broad prosperity as creating the conditions that ease the way for progressive reforms like women’s suffrage or the abolishment of slavery, allowing those changes to be implemented without hurting the interests of the currently-powerful too much, driving down the cost of Goodness and thus drumming up demand. But at the core, there is genuine moral persuasion, consensus-building about the nature of the Good.

Various historical reform movements (most saliently to me the abolitionist movement in the US) drew a strong connection between Truth or Reason, and the Good. Take the poem The Present Crisis, published in 1845 by ardent abolitionist James Russell Lowell, extensively quoted by Martin Luther King, including in his famous “arc of the moral universe” sermon. Here we see a deep entanglement between truth and goodness, a conviction that goodness will win in the end because of its truth (note that “scaffold” refers to an executioner’s block):

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

…

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,

Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ‘tis prosperous to be just;

This vibe isn’t very “in” right now. If anything, it’s closer to the opposite, where the people who most visibly claim the mantle of the Good are often ostentatiously suspicious of the concept of things being true, and the people who most loudly talk about Truth often want to use it to mock the idea of being nice to others.

This makes me sad, because I deeply love both truth and goodness. And I feel a strong preverbal conviction that, at least in humans, they are intimately entwined.

There are predictable dynamics to how rational moral arguments — or at least, moral arguments very structurally similar to the kind of arguments that would clearly be rational in a domain like physics — interact with human brains. There is a logic to how argument acts to systematically amplify some intuitions and dampen others in the same ways across many people. Something about the heuristics that help us find out what’s true in the domains of math and science — simplicity, symmetry, consistency — also tend to lead us to “fairness” and “kindness” in the values domain.

In Scott Alexander’s Unsong, one of the characters confronts God about the problem of evil, asking why we were not offered the choice to exist in this world, asking how the world could be “good” if it had so much suffering in it, if (as it does in the story) it has literal Hell in it.

“As long as Hell exists and is eternal, you were wrong to create the world, you are wrong to sustain it, and…you are wrong about the problem of evil.”

“YES,” said God. “WHICH IMPLIES THAT HELL MUST NOT BE ETERNAL. I DID NOT SAY…THAT YOUR WORLD IS GOOD NOW. I SAID THAT…ITS SEED, WAS A GOOD SEED. THAT IT WILL UNFOLD, BIT BY BIT, RINGING CONCLUSION AFTER CONCLUSION FROM ITS PREMISES, UNTIL FINALLY ITS OWN INTERNAL LOGIC CULMINATES IN ITS SALVATION.”

I am not a moral realist.⁸ And I am not a technological determinist. As much as I wish the deflationary story of human moral evolution were 100% true, I can absolutely conceive of an incredibly technologically advanced and wealthy civilization that is nonetheless utterly barbaric. I think we may encounter such civilizations out there in the cosmos, or we may become one. My atheism runs pretty deep…but I do think that on this tiny little planet, in the minds of these tiny little apes there are vast forces at work (not omnipotent, but vast) all around us every day, dragging us a little closer toward the light.

1. I’m told this is in part because unlike those other avatars, Ram was a one-woman man. I personally prefer the polyamorous Krishna, depending on how you count an eight-to-eight-million-woman man who AFAIK didn’t set even one of them on fire even once.

2. In fact, he does this twice, though after the second time she asks her mother the Earth to swallow her, I like to think because she’s sick of his shit.

3. Like how I don’t distance myself today from people who eat meat. And indeed, I’m not vegan and though I buy high-welfare eggs for myself I’m not particularly fussed about buying pastries at coffee shops with eggs in them, even though eggs are among the worst kinds of animal products to consume. Not constantly doing evil, it turns out, is quite the slog.

4. And their moms would feel so happy to hear that. When my mom told me about this kind of thing I would tell her I thought it was disgusting and her culture was disgusting. I have mixed feelings about my conduct here.

5. Don’t believe me? There are tens of billions of men who have lived on this Earth, so naively odds are strong that the people I personally know aren’t among the kindest. But on my moral perspective — and also probably the one you learned in kindergarten — pretty much only people born and raised in modern Western democracies get much of a shot at being the kindest people in history (they’re the same people who have much of a shot at being the smartest, strongest, fastest, wealthiest, most knowledgeable, etc people in history too). And on top of that, my friends mostly come from the EA community. Despite what lazy critics say, EA is not obvious or banal and it’s not for show. We attract and cultivate a rare kind of care and moral seriousness here.

6. Yes, I understand about sex differences in personality and abilities and the limited influence of parenting on measurable long-term outcomes at a population level, and the pattern that differences in personality and occupation are larger in more gender-equal societies. The sense of awe and grace I feel that there are now so many little girls growing up in households as kind and equal as the ones I know is not contingent on any of those things not being true.

7. I was the kind of kindergartener who would always raise my hand and never tell a lie and occasionally lecture kids and adults alike about the immortal words of Martin Luther King Jr.

8. I wish I were — it would probably make me work harder and derive more meaning from my work, and make me less afraid of what might be in store in the long-term future because I would expect the aliens and the AIs to discover the moral truth. But I simply don't see it (unless you're talking about the relatively weaksauce kind of moral realism I flirt with in this post).