Maps of Meaning 01 (Harvard Lectures)

Oh, ha, alright, I should welcome my extension school students, who will be looking at this tomorrow night.

Okay, you turn to the back of the syllabus where it says 2: Calendar Events. This is a course about the causes of social conflict. I’m not interested in social conflict from the perspective of a political scientist or a sociologist. I’m interested in intergroup conflict, but not at the level of group analysis. I’m interested in what role social identity or group identity plays in individual psychology... and why it is that individuals are motivated to participate in acts of social conflict.

I am using for an example here the Holocaust. I was thinking last week... writing part of the preface to the book that you're going to read... about the Holocaust Museum in Washington [DC]. Now there's a lot of--obviously this is a museum to the Jews, primarily, who were killed by the Nazis in World War 2. There are a number of museums like this throughout the world, and their central motto is “never forget.” This has always been confusing to me: this notion of “never forget(ting)” because I don’t think you can remember something that you don’t understand.

And I don’t think we understand why the Holocaust happened in World War 2. I think you might regard the Holocaust as an unlearned lesson. And I don’t think you can process information you don’t comprehend. So to say “never forget” begs the question: “what is it you’re supposed to remember?” Is it the fact that 6 million people were killed? Is it the fact of that particular event, or are you supposed to be giving some consideration to Holocaust-like events that have occurred through history?

Because there are people who think that what happened in World War 2 was a relatively unique event— of something unparalleled in history. This is not a position that I adopt. I think, actually, it’s a very common sort of event. It was perhaps… It was the event of that sort that has proved most shocking to the European conscience, so to speak—but it hardly strikes me as unique.

People often talk about the Holocaust in terms of the relationship between the Jews and the Germans or between the Jews and the Nazis. The Jews obviously playing the part of victims and the Nazis often—are always—playing the part of the perpetrators. And, of course, this is absolutely comprehensible from the historical point of view but it also strikes me that if what we remember is that the Nazis killed the Jews then we’re already on the road to making a mistake that’s similar to the mistake that was made that led to the Holocaust to begin with which is to identify characteristics that lead to patterns of action of that sort.

As characteristics of groups! Identifiable groups. And it seems to me... I mean, I’m not trying to equate the role of the Jews and the Nazis in producing the Holocaust—that would be obviously absurd. What I’m trying to say is that the lesson seems to me to be especially when you consider the propensity for Holocaust-like events is deeply rooted in human nature. The lesson to draw from the events of World War 2 is that: that’s what human beings are like—not what the Nazis were like.

Because these sorts of events happen all the time. It’s obviously the case that there are, well, in the 20th century alone the English invented the Concentration Camp in South Africa. Germans perfected it. Chinese used it to great advantage. Solzhenitsyn estimated—I'll show this on the next slide—that 66 million people in the Soviet Union were killed as a consequence of internal repression, many of whom went through camp-like procedures on the road to their demise.

We see ethnic cleansing occurring in places like Rwanda and even once again in Europe: in the Balkans. Whatever it was that we were supposed to have learned from the events of the Second World War hasn’t been learned, nor been remembered, because you can’t remember what you don’t understand.

That’s what this course is about. I’ve been working since 1985, I guess, on trying to figure out what it is about people... Remember Hannah Arendt. Maybe you know this, maybe you don't. She’s a famous political scientist. She was a student of Martin Heidegger. She wrote a book called “The Banality of Evil.”

One of her points was that—these people—she was talking about the Nazis in particular—people who perpetrated events like this—if you meet them, if you talk to them, if you have an encounter with them—the thing that’s often striking about them is not their striking abnormality or their evident evil but the fact that they are much like other people that you might have met, which I suppose might not be so surprising when you think about how thoroughly, for example, the Nazi movement dominated the German consciousness, or, likewise, with Communism in the Soviet Union.

Those ideological movements characterized people! They didn’t characterize some strange sort of misfits whose consciousness was characterized by something incomprehensible that led them to perform the kind of actions that we’re theoretically supposed to remember.

My perspective on all this is that the fact that people are capable of perpetrating atrocities like those that characterized the Holocaust says something about what people are like. What everybody is like because it strikes me that that kind of tendency is something that’s deeply rooted in human nature.

And then to say that, well, “What was it about the Nazis?” or “What was it about the Soviet Communists that led them to participate in this sort of behavior?” is completely besides the point, in a sense. All that does is: you’re looking for some sort of group characteristic that is devoid—you don’t have any personal relationship with that group. The problem is instantly made abstract.

As far as I’m concerned, if it is abstract, well then, once again, nothing is remembered. Now what I want to do is to try to outline the reasons why something like the Holocaust should have occurred. What it is about us that makes us so concerned with protecting our group identities. What these identities mean. What role they play in the regulation of emotion.

That’s the critical thing, right there: for me, ideologies are the expression—in a sense—the verbal expression of the internal structures that regulate our emotions. When you mess around with someone’s ideologies, therefore, as a consequence, you’re messing around with the inhibitory structure that regulates the interplay between their emotions.

So we're gonna study, in part, in this course, what emotions are and... how they are rooted in neuropsychology and neurophysiology and ... how they manifest themselves in behavior, how they might be controlled. I also hope to make—as I said, I want to make—the lessons here personal. I am not interested in discussing the issue from the abstract perspective because I don't think that... an issue of this magnitude deserves to be discussed at an abstract level.

It's not an abstract problem. There's something peculiar about us that we have to learn to control because... as far as I'm concerned, ... we're too technologically powerful to remain at the whims of the uncomprehend aspects of our nature.

"Peace, predictability and the delusion of self-representation." Well, what does that mean? Well, if you can predict something, as a general rule... like, it's hard to determine ... why it is that you think that you understand something when you think you do. If you think about it for a moment, it gets complicated because you're surrounded by things that... at some level of analysis, you cease to understand.

It doesn't matter what phenomena it is. Even the most mundane objects become mysterious if you look into them far enough. You take something as simple as a chair. It's made out of wood. That's all. There is nothing remarkable about that.

But if you start looking into the structure of the wood, how the organism, the tree, produced it and... all the chemical reactions that go about, bringing that about and the development of history that led to ... the emergence of plants and trees. Well, you can see that even in something mundane are embedded all sorts of mysteries.

Let me step one step back. What's Emotion? Emotion is the subjective sensation that you feel when you encounter a situation that has implications for action. Emotion occupies the space between sensory input and motor output. If you encounter something that has significance, you feel an emotion; and an emotion is the subjective sense that accompanies the activation or pre-activation of motor output systems.

That's basically how it occurs, appears. You say, well... You can think of the world the way that we normally think which is as something that exists objectively and something that is amenable to scientific description. Or you can think of it as a place that is full of things that has implications for actions.

As far as stories are concerned, the universe is full of things that has implications for actions. That's the environment from the narrative perspective. The most fundamental substructure of narratives can become myths.

The next thing I want to show you is how myths fundamentally represent the world insofar as it's conceived of as something that has implications for behavior. Something that has emotional significance. See, the world of the scientific option, so to speak, is devoid of emotional significance. Really, by design.

Part of what you do in the scientific procedure is eradicate anything that is purely subjective like emotion. If you think a theory is true because you like the theory, then that is not sufficient grounds for considering it to be true from a scientific perspective. You are supposed to make yourself objective. Which basically means to eradicate your emotional assessment of a given situation.

The thing is that we are always assessing situations for their affective significance. We have to do that because emotions or affect means how to act. In every situation.