ChandraRama

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR: The evolution of in-group morality

Excellent article by John Hartung.

It explains most of the good things in bible are actually ingroup moralities that seeks to bind the jewish tribes against the "others"

Starting from ten commandments and till new testament, all the "love thy neighbor" kind of stuff is actually vicious addresses that seek ingroup binding.

I am not sure if this good article is discussed here.

HaRaAYaH

That is the biggest load of ___ I have ever seen in my life.....

Toto

Is there a particular point that you consider to be a load of ___ ? It is certainly a load of ___ with a respectable academic pedigree.

Is there something that outrageous to seeing rules of morality as related to the in-group, but later being expanded to all of humanity by hopeful thinkers?

XKV8R

the whole 'love your neighbor' argument was actually anti-'in group'. i mean, the whole point of the story of the 'good samaritan' was to show that one should be kind/receive kindness from outsiders, and not limit kindness to the in-group.

i like the parts about altruism, kin selection, and sociobio. brings me back to my schooling in evolution and seminars involving e.o. wilson. but methinks the conclusions are a bit skewed. true, the jewish law codes (especially the 10 commandments) were essentially property laws (even the really really 'ethical' ones), but christianity certainly sought to apply them universally, to all peoples. admittedly, that is much easier to do when you are already in the 'out-crowd.' one could argue that it was the shift in christianity from pacifism to conquest that allowed it to truly become a major religion. however, in that sense, the essential idea of 'love your neighbor' was already lost.

HaRaAYaH

He quotes things out of context against the teachings of Judaism. Reads the Talmud on his own and decides that what Jews have been teaching for 2000 years is wrong and it really means something else. He makes factual errors that render him mostly unbelievable.

maddog

I think that "love thy neighbor" represents a continuum along a moral and emotional maturity scale. I think Stephen Covey said something similar in his "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" series: The first stage is dependence (where others take care of you), the second stage is independence (where you take care of yourself), and the third stage is interdependence (where you recognize that we help take care of each other). It has a synergistic effect, where the sum of the parts then becomes greater than the whole: a dependent person drags the enterprise down, an independent person contributes his/her own share to the enterprise, and interdependent people can take an enterprise well beyond the separate efforts of people working independently.

In the same way, "love thyself" can be seen as the parallel of the dependent stage, where the person is primarily "self" centered. This has both its good points (you have to start by loving yourself, so "they" say) and its bad points (selfishness).

"Love thy neighbor," or the "golden rule," is the first effort to look beyond the immediacy of self-involvement, to realize that there are social as well as individual aspects of morality. I think that this also can have its good side (moving beyond selfishness or narcissism) and its bad side (in-group selfishness). In any particular case it may or may not promote genuine empathy, but at least it takes steps in that direction.

I always thought that the revolutionary aspect of "love thy neighbor" as attributed to Jesus in the NT was its pairing with "love thy enemy;" my interpretation has been that the idea is that everyone is my neighbor and there is no "enemy." This takes the moral continuum beyond self-identification, and self-group-identification to other-centered thinking. It takes it beyond the "golden rule," (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you), which remains in some ways self-centered, by projecting one's own desires toward another person, to what (Stephen Covey again) calls the "platinum rule," which is to treat the other person as THEY wish to be treated, not as YOU wish to be treated. It takes another increment of empathy, of effort to truly understand things from the OTHER person's point of view.

my 2 ¢

#2039

XKV8R

several sociobiologists have shown/attempted to show that the kin-selection gene is still mere natural selection attributed to a kin/family unit rather than just to the individual. and this can account for most of the 'kindness' that is shown by humans. rivalries between peoples are simply amplified tribal/kin unit rivalries (at least that is how those who espouse to the kin selection theory believe).

where it all breaks down is how humans have developed the idea/notion that we should help those that are otherwise genetically inferior (i say this in a purely biological sense). natural selection states that the bigger, faster, stronger, more cunning, animals get to reproduce and the lesser-thans die out. yet, humanity for some strange reason has developed a trait in which we seek to help those in need. i'm especially talking about direct genetic inferiorities like lack of fertility, size, genetic diseases, etc. obviously, the nazis experimented with this and we rightly condemn them for this. why? because it is this trait that has led to increased diversity among the human race. rather than bottlenecking the race into a narrow genetic strand (see research on the cheetah genome) many evolutionary biologists argue that this diversity (brought about by allowing otherwise 'inferior' genes in the genome) is our salvation against catastrophic disasters, and is the reason why we have survived and evolved to the extent we have. (see the arguments in favor of the survival of and selection for and sickle cell anemia in africa as a defense against malaria.) our diversity is our strength, even though achieving that diversity comes via directly from acting counter to natural selection and our genetic programming.

is it simply that humans have evolved to a point that we can override the genetic programming (natural selection) that got us to this point? and where to from here?

that said.... lol....i think that christianity's 'love your neighbor/love your enemy command was genuinely designed to love outsiders, not the opposite.

ChandraRama

I always wondered how is that immediately after saying the "love thy neighbour" there are addresses to the israelis from supposedly same god to kill the nonjews

This essay explains why so.

HaRaAYaH

Your post explains you are clearly ignorant of what the Torah says, to lazy to open a bible, or you just like repeat things you read or hear because they comport with your distorted world view.

After the Golden Rule,

19. Prohibition on mixing.
20-22 What happens if man has sex with another man's slave.
23-25 How to treat produce when they enter the land for the first time
26. No eating blood. No sooth saying.
27. No cutting your side burns
28. No tattoos or cutting of the human body.
29. Do not allow your daughter to be a prostitute.
30. Keep the Sabbath
31. Do not turn to ghosts
32. Show respect to the aged
33. When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.
34. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.
By the way ChandraRama, how do you twist these two verses into referring only to Jews?
35-36:Business ethics
37. Faithfully observe all the rules.

So just how many verses is immediately afterward?

If you don't want to believe in Judaism, that's fine with me. Don't distort what it says or what it teaches. That says more about you than it does about Judaism.

ChandraRama

While may not be immediate, the text in Old testament is very explicit in annihilating the women, men, children of the rival tribes.

While I may agree that I may not know indepth Torah, I am taken by the following text in the above mentioned article.

Thou Shalt Not Kill Who?

Specific laws which follow from the love law can be better understood by keeping the ingroup definition of neighbor in mind. Consider the proto-legal portion of The Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5:17-21; JPS '17 & KJV):


Thou shalt not kill.
Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Neither shalt thou steal.
Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour
Neither shall you covet your neighbor's wife and you shall not desire your neighbor's
house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that
is your neighbor's.


And add the realization that the scrolls from which these words were translated have no periods, no commas, and no first-word capitalization. Decisions about where sentences and paragraphs begin and end are courtesy of the translator. Accordingly, instead of being written as five separate paragraphs of one sentence each, without changing any of the words, Deuteronomy 5:17-21 could be translated:


Thou shalt not kill, neither shalt thou commit adultery, neither shalt thou steal, neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour. Neither shall you covet your neighbor's wife, and you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.


Here the question, "Thou shalt not kill who?" is answered "Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor — the children of thy people, your countrymen" … your fellow in-group member.

How unconventional is this interpretation? Not very. The rabbis of the Talmud determined that an Israelite was not liable for murder unless he intentionally killed a fellow Israelite. Indeed, if an Israelite intended to kill a non-Israelite, but killed an Israelite by mistake, he was not guilty of murder. The law (Mishna) is explicit in this regard (Sanhedrin 79a):


If he intended killing an animal but slew a man, or a heathen and he killed an Israelite … he is not liable.


And the discussion (Gemara) of this law gives a clear example:


This excludes [from liability] the case of one who threw a stone into the midst of a company of Israelites and heathens. How is this? Shall we say that the company consisted of nine heathens and one Israelite? Then his non-liability can be inferred from the fact that the majority were heathens.


So if a defendant admits to having killed a fellow in-group member by throwing a stone, his plea of innocence should be accepted if there is reason to believe that he was aiming at an out-group member. In this regard, the rabbis of the Talmud, who are traditionally designated the Sages, took an extraordinarily lenient view of what would constitute evidence of intent, extending credibility to a perpetrator even if there was only one out-group member in the company of nine in-group members (Sanhedrin 79a, Baba Kamma 44b):


And even if half and half, when there is doubt in a capital charge, a lenient attitude must be taken! ... if there were nine Jews and one heathen ... still, since there was among them one heathen, he was an essential part of the group, and essential part is reckoned as equivalent to half, and where there is doubt in a criminal charge the accused has the benefit.


As one might expect, the law for inadvertent killing was not symmetrical. If an outgroup member accidentally killed an in-group member, he was guilty of Murder One. Maimonides, whose summarizations and condensations of the Torah and the Talmud are generally accepted as authoritative, put the point succinctly (Book of Torts 5:5:4):


If a resident alien slays an Israelite inadvertently, he must be put to death in spite of his inadvertence.


The Book of Judges (Maimonides, 5:9:4) confirms this:


A Noahide [non-Jew] who kills a person, even if he kills an embryo in the mother's womb, is put to death. So too, if he kills one suffering from a fatal disease ... he is put to death. In none of these cases is an Israelite put to death.