[The reference in the original piece is to:
Alexis Madrigal, "Dog Unto Others: Canines Have Sense of Fairness," http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/dogenvy.html; The Citizen]
Update by Citizen Wald: All kidding aside, it
is interesting to compare the above with the treatment in the mainstream media. Writing for
National Geographic, Rebecca Carroll entitled her report, "Dogs Can Feel Envy, Study Suggests."
The first scientific study to find envy in non-primates affirms what many already know: dogs can get jealous.
"Everybody who has a dog at home probably [suspects] that dogs can be very jealous of other dogs and also of people," said lead author Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria.
In experiments with 43 dogs, Range's team showed that the canines reacted to inequity. (full article)
I have just a couple of things to add.
To begin with, the proper word (as a philosopher-colleague used to insist on explaining to us in faculty meetings) should be "envy" rather than "jealousy"--for example, that's why the King James Bible has God say, "I am a jealous God"--not an envious God (would you want an "envious" God? He's tough enough as is); perhaps my friend Kathy will pick up this theme in her
new blog. Okay: three things to add. ("Our
three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency.")
One sees here the contrast between two worldviews: Socialism regards people as basically good, communitarian, and desirous of cooperation, and expects good to result. Capitalism, by contrast, is based on greed (the secularized equivalent of the Augustinian Catholic/Protestant notion of the utter depravity of human nature), and regards people as individualistic and selfish, and yet expects: volilà, good to result. Go figure. To a socialist, the dog behavior is about a positive thing, a feeling of moral outrage at inequity. To a the mainstream capitalist journalist, the dog behavior is about a negative thing (envy [vide supra] is, after all, not a positive character trait--closer to the covetousness forbidden in the Ten Commandments than the jealousy of God): resentment at the good fortune of another. The emphasis on the personal motivations of the dog rather than the social circumstances that occasioned them exemplifies the differences in the foundational assumptions.
To return to an only slightly more serious plane again, the dog behavior also fits a larger pattern that seems to transcend species (I've been a member of a faculty team that is studying the interdisciplinary significance of evolution in the context of our program in
Culture, Brain, and Development. Putting a natural-scientific spin on the public response to the recent financial meltdown, the Science Times this past October ran an article by Benedict Carey entitled [in the print edition], "Wired for Justice: The urge to punish is more than Wall Street loathing: it's instinctive," which noted, inter alia:
“The urge to take revenge or punish cheaters,” said Michael McCullough, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and author of the book “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct,” “is not a disease or toxin or sign that something has gone wrong. From the point of view of evolution, it’s not a problem but a solution.”
The downside of these instincts, Dr. McCullough added, “is that they often promote behavior that turns out to be spiteful in the long run.”
The urge to punish is not restricted to humans. Researchers have found evidence of self-protective retaliation, or revenge, and third-party, or “moralistic,” punishment in many of nature’s diverse niches.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Fortunately for the economy, researchers say, a strong countervailing psychological force is also at work: the instinct to forgive, and to cooperate. Punishments are balanced by peace offerings, and in fact researchers have come close to calculating the rough ratio most people employ.
[The article explains that people tend to reward the behavior of another in kind: cooperation engenders cooperation, and betrayal prompts retaliation. Ultimately, though, the desire is for cooperation, and cooperation ultimately proves most advantageous to all parties. --The Citizen]
. . . . . . . . . .
The upshot of all this, researchers say, is that human beings prefer cooperation, both in their individual makeup and in the makeup of their social groups. In a recent study, Dr. McCullough found that the urge for revenge against personal betrayals erodes in the same way some kinds of memory do: sharply in the first few weeks, slowly thereafter.
“The forgiveness instinct is every bit as wired in as the revenge instinct,” he said. “It seems that our minds work very hard to get away from resentment, if we can.” (full article)
Actually, this reminds me of something else. (Okay, four things to add. "Amongst our weaponry...").
Hampshire College has been participating in a
study of student experience conducted by the respected Wabash College Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts. Among the most striking findings: students did not find our courses "challenging." This was obviously a serious blow to a very expensive private college that likes to call itself the leading innovative educational institution in the country. Experts in the field of "assessment" (something of a trendy bullshit term, but one that contains a kernel of not fully digested truth within the mass of waste matter) like to think--not unreasonably, it seems to me--that claims should be demonstrable: if you say that you have goal X, you should be able to show, by some means accessible to the average rational human, that you are attaining or at least moving closer to it. Calling yourself something doesn't make it true (think of your own examples from politics or personal life). As a member of the Wabash Site Visit Team and the College Retention Committee, I have had a close-up look at the survey methods and results.
Even more telling and disturbing (if that is possible) than the results of the survey themselves were the responses of most of my colleagues. That's a matter for another posting, but in brief: many simply refused to confront the fact, raising excuse after excuse, only to be told that this or that potential explanation had been factored in and ruled out. The typical response was: "Well,
MY course was challenging. It must have been someone else's they were talking about." Well, (1) if
ALL individual courses were challenging, then how do you account for the collective result? (2) that's a nice expression of self-esteem, but what faculty consider "challenging"--e.g. assigning difficult but ideologically homogenous pieces (the often
unintelligible works of
Judith Butler spring to mind) to which one expects a set ideological response--may not constitute a "challenge" in the minds of most rational humans, not to mention, eighteen-year-olds.
As my mentor when I got here used to tell me and students alike: "When three people tell you you're drunk, it's time to lie down and take a nap."
Basically, the faculty went through the stages of trauma and grief, on a petty academic plane (the emotions run so high because the stakes are so low): Having moved through "denial" and "anger," they are (more than a year later) getting around to "acceptance," though most of their proposed solutions display a disconnect with the actual causes of the problem.
To connect with the stories above: one of the sources of student discontent (above and beyond boring, dogmatic, or otherwise intellectually unchallenging courses) was a feeling that they lacked an intellectual and moral community that shared their own values about both ideas and hard work: (1) Some students came here (inspired by our publicity) eager to learn and found others more interested in smoking weed. (2) Serious students also expressed resentment at the fact that--in an institution in which a culture of lax attitudes toward deadlines has been endemic for decades--students who failed to meet deadlines or even complete all their work seemed to face no sanctions, and sometimes even received very positive evaluations (we write individual prose assessments rather than assign mere letter grades). Whether this was because professors were inherently kindhearted, gutless and scared of bad student reviews, or just lacking in standards themselves was a topic of some debate. In any case, the difference between superior performance, average performance, or failure to perform was blurred, and many students found that picture disturbing.
Dean of the Faculty Aaron Berman offered a
usefully concrete response to these findings that just happened to reflect the same results shown in the scientific studies cited above. My Social Science colleague Michelle Bigenho taught a January term course in Bolivian music and culture in which, as he puts it: "Several of the instruments that the students use and practice require two people to complete a scale. The students quickly come to understand that if they miss class they deprive their comrades of the ability to practice; they learn that the success of one is dependent upon the success or all." All the students did the work on time and supported one another.
I train dogs. I teach students. Allowing for the necessary biological-psychological differences between them: The average rational person--like a dog (the most humane and rational creature on the planet)--would see it as a simple matter of equity: Do the trick and get the biscuit. Don't perform: (to dog) no reward; (to humans) We told you the requirements in advance. Sorry, no evaluation.
And of course, there are no bad dogs: only bad humans who fail to treat and raise them well.
Madame de Staël (who was something of a bitch herself): "The more I see of men the more I like dogs."
Mark Twain: "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man; (Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar)
and "The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 4/2/1899"
Amen. Praise be to dog.
