nemorathwald | The Alpha Male Monkey

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The Alpha Male Monkey

I mentioned this essay on The Sci Phi Show and said that I'd put it back at the top of the site when the episode aired so the listeners could see the illustration, so here it is.

Imagine if transportation was defined as a device that uses horses or sails-- automobile drivers would be accused of denying the existence of transportation.

We're genetically programmed to see an Alpha Male in our primate pack as the source of truth and moral law. This explains the difficulty I have in communicating alternative models of truth and moral law to bible believers. It's not that they reject the model I present, it's that they literally don't know what I'm saying. It's a mental block. We take away the concept of the Alpha Male Monkey in the sky, and they think we've declared truth and morality to be nonexistent, because to them, "right" is defined as: "whatever the Alpha Male Monkey says." By definition. The discussion goes like this:

Bible Believer: "So... where is the Alpha Male Monkey in your model? Is it you? Why should I have to do what you say?"

Me: "No no, there isn't one. Right and wrong are based on the suffering of the victim, not obedience to laws."

Bible Believer: "Um. So we're abolishing laws? There's no law against, for instance, rape?"

Me: "No, if somebody says 'don't rape me', it's wrong."

Bible Believer: "So, she's the Alpha Male Monkey?"

Me: "THERE IS NO ALPHA MALE MONKEY. Morality doesn't look like this:

It looks like this:

We're all equally at the top."

Bible Believer: "We're all Alpha Male Monkeys? I can't believe you're arrogant enough to think you have omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence."

Me: "We're all equally at the top, but the top is a lot lower than perfection. We don't need that; it still works just fine."

Bible Believer: "So what if it works? You don't have a replacement Alpha Male Monkey to obey, so why should I care? I define 'morality' as 'obedience' as you depicted in the first chart. Therefore you have no basis for morality."

Me: "But it works! If you want to be moral, just do unto others as you would have them do unto you!"

Bible Believer: "There you go trying to command me again. Who died and made you Alpha Male Monkey?"

Me: "I didn't command you. I said 'if' you want to be moral. I'm pointing out to you how to accomplish something you said you wanted to accomplish, and how to measure how whether you've acheived it. If you don't want to be moral, I'll let you deal with the problems that come along with that."

Bible Believer: "Hold on a minute... I'm trying to find a command from an Alpha Male Monkey in that... where was he again?"

Me: *facepalm*

As the old tract goes, "only two choices on the shelf: live for God or live for self." It literally doesn't occur to them to see beyond that fase dichotomy. Notice that I didn't get around to defending my model because I literally couldn't get across what it was. Hopefully the concept of an Alpha Male Monkey will help to explain this in the future.

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One person's thought process in choosing morality based on not harming another is not on the same scale as a god object who supposedly created the universe and mandated morals. I'm sure Matt never insinuated that he was replacing any type of god figure in that regard. Omitting to use a god figure does not necessarily mean the person omitting becomes that figure.

If you can not escape the Alpha Male Monkey model in your mind try to think of it in this way. Every last human being is only a part of that Alpha Male model which continuously evolves its own morality together as one being regulating itself. One part, one human being, can not possibly be this thing or have such a wide influence.

As I understand it, the point of the above essay is not that humans are different from the Christian God, but that the Christian mental model of morality is incompatible with Matt's proposed one. All I'm saying is that both are actually using the same mental model.

[I accidentally submitted the above post while it was still incomplete, so this is continued from that]

The two models are the same, because they both involve moral law being handed down, and this simply has to be obeyed. Matt (or whoever else claims the same things) is that figure in his model, and God is that figure in the traditional Christian model.

Matt's moral law is "The rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by the amount of suffering it produces." You are being immoral if you do an avoidable thing that causes great suffering. No one can decide that it is moral to cause great suffering; there is no flexibility for different opinions, tastes, desires, or beliefs.

It seems what you are trying to point out is that although Matt dictates unquestionable moral law, he doesn't tell you which particular actions you have to do to fulfill it. Those actions are determined by the particular circumstance surrounding the actions. Even if this were a significant distinction, and I don't think it is, the same has been true in traditional Christian thought. To take a well-known example, consider "Thou shalt not kill". While Jews and Christians have traditionally affirmed this law, they also make exceptions in certain circumstances (e.g. war, capital punishment). The reason they make these exceptions is because they think those actions are in accordance with some greater principle. As another example, take the issues of modern ethical debate: abortion, euthanasia, the environment, etc. None of these things are addressed directly by the Christian scriptures, so people use the ethical framework they perceive in the Bible to measure the specific actions and see if they are moral or not.

So, I have to disagree with the assertion that there is a mental model incompatibility between the Christian ideas about morals and Matt's ideas.

There is a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in which Calvin says "if I don't watch TV, what will I watch?" "If we don't obey God, who will we obey?" When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and unfortunately that's how mental conditioning works sometimes.

It's not that he or she rejects what we're saying. It's that his or her mind skipped over the parts of what I wrote, in which we directly addressed what I knew that he or she was going to say. And just as I predicted, he or she fell into the exact trap I described, because he or she literally didn't hear it. That's what I meant by a mental block. So he or she goes around and around in a highly repetitious fashion reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch.

Don't expend your energy to repeat yourself. Just link a URL back to the first time it was said, and make them read it again until reading comprehension kicks in.

Your Calvin and Hobbes strip doesn't map onto what you're talking about. The correct mapping would be "If I don't watch images on TV, what will I watch on it?" You are saying "We can all decide as a community which images to watch on TV. So we're not watching images!". Of course, these two statements aren't related.

There are models that aren't like the Alpha Male Monkey, but you're not proposing one. As you pointed out, you have to junk the whole idea of watching TV if you want to get away from seeing images on it, since watching TV necessarily includes watching images.

One such model would be "Each person decides what is moral." This model could not condemn someone who says it's immoral to help the poor or cure cancer. Nor could it condemn someone who says that it's moral to torture small children for her enjoyment. But, the advantage is that there is no moral law that is handed down from above. Someone can even say "Morality is absolute for everyone!" and it doesn't contradict the model.

However, as soon as you try to dictate universal moral law, you're using the Alpha Male Monkey model.

I understand you don't want to engage these ideas and that's fine, but I feel compelled to present them anyway.

It occurs to me, Matt, why you're reluctant to engage the ideas of the previous anonymous poster. It also occurs to me why you can make a clean distinction between the hierarchical moral model and your own moral model. I would wager that it's because of the *kind* of Christian (or theist generally) you have interacted with in all of your arguments. Allow me to explain.

The sort of Christian your hierarchical moral model presupposes is one for whom the following things pose little or no problem:

1) the material transmission of the Scriptures
2) dubious authority of some key texts
3) the difficulty of translating the ethical norms of a first-century Palestinian society to the circumstances of the 21st century

The sort of Christian you have interacted with doesn't realize the extent of the above problems. He sits down to read the OT Law alone on a Sunday afternoon and thinks he's just received a transparent message from God. He thinks he understands the Law exactly, he thinks he knows how to relate it to himself exactly; indeed, he thinks he has a personal pipeline to God in his reading. This sort of Christian doesn't realize how distorted his own untrained readings of OT Law are. And this sort of Christian certainly doesn't realize how thin the ethical material in the New Testament really is. It's quite, quite hard to construct a concrete, universal ethics from the New Testament (as the debate within Christendom over war might suggest, and as any responsible reading of literature in the field of Christian ethics will show).

Now, the sort of Christian who DOES recognize the problems I listed above (let us call him the Informed Christian) is not really in a very different position from your own when it comes to his daily decision-making. The Informed Christian does not have a direct pipeline to God. The Informed Christian is not really certain what the upshot of the Scriptures is when it comes to ethics. The Informed Christian knows that the Scriptures don't give us much specific information when it comes to ethics/rules about living and behaviors. The Informed Christian knows that every ethical choice he makes will thus require discernment and study. So, even though he theoretically acknowledges a God who commands his ethical decisions, practically-speaking, he has to figure out how to make his choices honor that God, whose will is NOT clearly expressed in terms of "You must always do X; you must never do Y."

It seems to me that your own ethical principle ("avoid whatever causes the victim suffering") provides a lot more direction than the God of the New Testament when it comes to outlining how to act in the world. The New Testament contains a lot of really diverse writings that present sometimes radically opposing views (e.g. the full inclusion of women in the church in the Gospel of Luke v. admonitions against women's participation in I Timothy). Thus, the Informed Christian has to comb all of these writings and figure out on what principle he can construct a coherent ethic. He has to do a lot of background analytic work BEFORE he even gets to your level of direction ("avoid whatever causes the victim suffering").

The Informed Christian has to use his own mind to analyze the texts that he must take for guidance and see if he can arrive at a coherent ethic in reading them. Then he must translate this ethic to deal with the particular situations he faces in his life. When an Informed Christian translates this ethic, he will apply it differently according to the exigencies of whatever particular situation he is facing (e.g. remarriage after divorce isn't always wrong). This whole process strikes me as quite similar to your own act of deciding that a Kantian ethic is good and then applying that ethic flexibly, when particular relationships call for different applications of the ethic.

You might think there is a theoretical difference between your own ethical model and the hierarchical model of a theist, but in practice, I think you and the Informed Christian are doing the exact same thing: analyzing a body of writings to figure out what ethic is best, and then applying that ethic in different ways when different relationships and people need slightly different interpretations of the ethic.

Matt, I wrote the above post (Informed Xians v. Blind Followers) and then it said I had exceeded the word limit for commenting. Just wanted to say three more things:

1. The situation is totally different for a Roman Catholic, whether informed or not. Only a Roman Catholic truly follows an Alpha Male Monkey model, for only a Roman Catholic knows exactly what is the case: whatever the Magisterium says. That's not to say that I don't respect Roman Catholicism, for any Catholic who happens to read this. I'm just pointing out a difference in fact. The will of God is a much, much clearer matter for a Roman Catholic than for a Protestant or Orthodox Christian. Indeed, the will of God is a categorically different matter; it doesn't even make sense to invoke a difference of degree.

2. I really liked your post and would love for you to respond to my comment in some way other than to just say "reread what I wrote." I would really like to understand your point of view. Please show me where you think my analysis of the situation is off.

3. I'm Olivia; we met at Penguicon. You visited my blog.

4. I definitely don't want to persuade you from taking up another model, worldview, etc. I'm just interested in further talk bc I find your thoughts interesting. Given your background in fundamentalist culture, I feel it important to make this clear.

Thanks for writing, Olivia. And thanks even more for identifying yourself. Doesn't it astonish you how passive a lot of church people can get? The earlier post is the sort of anonymous letter they would usually send someone when they're too full of "social pressure" churchiness to disagree with him to his face.

I'm happy to respond to you. It's not that I'm unwilling to engage the ideas the previous anonymous poster supplied-- It's that they are precisely the objections which I wrote the original post in order to address. So put yourself in my shoes; I saw that I had failed to communicate to him or her. It was not so much a post about morality as a post about a new metaphor with which to communicate successfully where I have always previously failed. And yet I saw a demonstration that-- at least with her or him-- I have failed again. He or she doesn't disagree with what I've said because he or she literally doesn't know what I said.

Just to repeat that one more time. The post wasn't about morality, it was about communicating with this person. I'm not even aiming to persuade any more! Just to create a shared dialect so that they can disagree with what I'm saying, instead of disagreeing with what they think I'm saying. I did not reply because I do not yet have a new way to say it. So I feel frustrated and unwilling to bang my head against that wall until I've given it another few months of thinking up new ways to make myself heard.

I also hope you will forgive me if I'm reluctant to participate in the argument among Christian sects which one is truly Informed. Usually I leave that to you and your co-religionists to fight over. When I left Christianity I abandoned that wild goose chase, and am enjoying the relaxation very much.

That having been said, I will tell you that I don't know how you can get so little from the scripture and not just throw out the whole religion. By the time I threw out as much bathwater as you have, I got to the bottom of the tub and found there was no baby in there after all. So I'll bite. Do you believe in a God who reportedly is intensely interested in getting a message across, and is powerful enough to communicate verbally, directly, and individually to every human, but chooses not to? Does salvation require that one learn Hebrew and Koine Greek?

Which body of writings am I analyzing to determine what ethic is best? Why would I do any such thing?

It's Olivia again. Matt, I think your questions are great. It's beyond the scope of a comment for me to respond to them, though, so I plan to write a blog post in response to your questions soon. The teaser: I do think there is a baby left after all the bathwater I've had to throw out. Will email you once I've written up the post.

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