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Eva Serra<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In an age marked by cancel culture, wokism, political polarisation and social change amplified by social media, morality has become one of the defining battlegrounds of contemporary public debate. Pablo Malo<\/strong>, a psychiatrist and science writer specialising in human behaviour, has established himself as one of the most prominent voices analysing the human mind from an evolutionary perspective. An expert in evolutionary psychology, Malo is the author of \u00a0Los peligros de la moralidad<\/em><\/a><\/span>,\u00a0and <\/em>co-author of\u00a0Psiquiatr\u00eda Evolucionista: una introducci\u00f3n<\/em><\/a><\/span>. He is co-editor of the evolutionary biology blog La Nueva Ilustraci\u00f3n Evolucionista<\/em><\/a><\/span>\u00a0and editor of the blog\u00a0Evoluci\u00f3n\u00a0y neurociencias<\/em><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n The author of numerous scientific publications, most recently focusing on suicide and its prevention, as well as on the evolution of suicide in the human species, he is also a member of the Txori-Herri Medical Association and of the psycho-rock band The Beautiful Brains<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When does morality become dangerous?<\/strong><\/p>\n When it punishes. The human moral mind is punitive. Morality and punishment go hand in hand; there can be no morality without punishment. In other words, we cannot have moral rules against killing, stealing, and so on, and then have nothing happen when people break them. Nor can we simply refrain from punishing enemies who seize our land and resources and attack our sacred values.<\/p>\n So, if we only punished people who genuinely deserved it, there would be no problem. If we punish the psychopath who has raped and murdered forty young women, fair enough. If we punish the tribe that has invaded us, no problem. And that is precisely how morality evolved\u2014how it first emerged. In those ancestral times, we lived in small bands where everyone knew everyone else. We knew who the selfish bully was who took advantage of everyone, and we knew who the members of the enemy tribe were who were trying to kill us.<\/p>\n But as societies grew larger, what is known as an evolutionary mismatch emerged. We no longer know everyone, and none of us can see everything that is going on. Instead, we depend on what the media and political leaders tell us, and their interests do not necessarily coincide with our own. Those intermediaries on whom we now rely to understand the world can give us a distorted picture of reality. They can tell us that the Jews are our enemies, or the Tutsis, or Charlie Kirk, and that they deserve to be killed.<\/p>\n \u201cThose intermediaries on whom we now rely to understand the world can give us a distorted picture of reality. They can tell us that the Jews are our enemies, or the Tutsis, or Charlie Kirk, and that they deserve to be killed\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is when morality becomes dangerous: when we start punishing people convinced that we are doing good, because the person we are about to punish is seen as evil or demonic. Yet history tells us that, all too often, they were no such villains or demons.<\/p>\n From an evolutionary psychology perspective, how do you explain the current phenomenon of political and social polarisation?<\/strong><\/p>\n The basic explanation is that the human moral mind is tribal. Human beings divide the world into \u201cThem\u201d and \u201cUs\u201d, and we do not apply the same moral standards to both groups. If politicians on the other side are corrupt, that is completely unacceptable. But when our side does exactly the same thing, it somehow does not seem quite so serious. Besides, that’s different\u2014you can’t compare the two. We act out of love, whereas they always act out of hatred. At the deepest level, morality is a tool for the survival of our group, and it will always serve that purpose: the group takes precedence over morality, not the other way round.<\/p>\n Where do hypermoralisation and ideological tribalism come from, and why have they become so influential?<\/strong><\/p>\n As I said in the previous answer, they stem from the human tendency to divide the world into \u201cThem\u201d and \u201cUs\u201d. They also arise from the human need to feel morally good and to signal that virtue to others. In the past, these needs were largely channelled through religion. Religion allowed us both to demonstrate and to feel that we were good and decent people. As traditional religion has declined\u2014or at least lost much of its influence\u2014something else has had to fill the gap. My view is that political ideology now performs that function. Wokism, for example, is one such substitute.<\/p>\n \u201cSocial media is what evolutionary biology calls a supernormal stimulus: an artificial and deceptive stimulus that activates our instincts\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n How have technological developments\u2014particularly social media and artificial intelligence\u2014contributed to the emergence of such highly emotional tribal divisions?<\/strong><\/p>\n Social media is what evolutionary biology calls a supernormal stimulus: an artificial and deceptive stimulus that activates our instincts more powerfully than ordinary natural stimuli. The concept comes from the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who presented certain birds with eggs that were larger and bluer than their own. The females preferred to incubate the artificial eggs rather than their own because they found them more attractive. A chocolate doughnut, sugary drinks, silicone breasts, and so on, are all examples of supernormal stimuli.<\/p>\n What social media does, therefore, is amplify our moral instincts and our sense of moral outrage. It does not invent anything new; it simply takes these tendencies to another level. And the platforms know that moral outrage is a goldmine. They exploit it in exactly the same way that pornography websites exploit our sexuality\u2014which is itself another supernormal stimulus.<\/p>\n How does the international political context influence this phenomenon? And what about the national context?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, this whole tribal dynamic that I have been describing can be seen quite clearly in both national and international politics. We need to recognise that morality is a form of power, a tool of social control, and political parties know it. That is why they seek moral supremacy: to shut down debate and push their opponents out of the ring. Once you have moral supremacy, you no longer need to debate, explain your ideas or persuade anyone. You simply throw the appropriate moral labels at your enemies\u2014Nazi, sexist, Islamophobe, and so on\u2014and that is the end of the debate. End of discussion.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce you have moral supremacy, you no longer need to debate, explain your ideas or persuade anyone\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What is your view of cancel culture? Is it rewarding for those who promote it?<\/strong><\/p>\n People who launch cancel campaigns are not usually seeking truth, goodness or what is right. What they are really after is status\u2014that is, moving up the social hierarchy. Being seen as one of the good people, and as the person who exposes the villains, earns a great deal of social capital. Their motives are often far more self-interested than they themselves would admit.<\/p>\n Are we moving away from the collective in favour of the individual?<\/strong><\/p>\n The answer requires some qualification. In social terms, it is true that loneliness, isolation and individualism are all increasing.<\/p>\n It is also true that, since the Enlightenment, Western history has placed considerable emphasis on individual rights. We can see this in the various declarations of rights associated with the political revolutions in England and France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ultimately in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.<\/p>\n My own view, however, is rather pessimistic. I believe that, in moral matters, the group remains the true moral compass, and I do not think that is likely to change. Individual rights look very good on paper, but history tells us that, when it comes down to it, the interests of the group prevail. The pandemic is a good example: individual rights went out of the window. The same can be seen in the war in Ukraine, where men are not allowed to leave the country and are sent to the trenches whether they like it or not.<\/p>\n The psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that the need to belong is a fundamental human need\u2014the need to belong to something larger than oneself, a group, ultimately. I see no evidence that this need has diminished; if anything, the opposite seems to be true. Although it is true that people now have a wider range of groups to which they can belong.<\/p>\n Is identity a moral issue?<\/strong><\/p>\n As I said earlier, to a large extent, yes. What we value in a partner or a friend is their moral character: whether they are honest, sincere, altruistic, cooperative, and so on. And we need to feel that we are good people. We cannot live with the sense that we are bad or that we are on the wrong side of morality. That is why morality forms such an important part of our identity.<\/p>\n Is moral outrage a profitable stance?<\/strong><\/p>\n As I mentioned earlier, it certainly is for the companies that own social media platforms. All the things that succeed on television or online tend to tap into fundamental aspects of human nature. Football appeals to our coalitional instincts and to the universal divide between \u201cThem\u201d and \u201cUs\u201d; pornography appeals to our sexual instincts; reality television appeals to our appetite for gossip\u2014we are creatures hungry for social information, and gossip is a human universal. Social media, meanwhile, thrives on setting us against one another and fuelling our moral outrage, because the platforms know that it is a powerful source of motivation.<\/p>\n Why has wokism been so successful?<\/strong><\/p>\n In my view, it is a substitute for religion. As I have been saying, we need to feel that we are good people and to signal that goodness to others. Wokism has an appealing side because it appears to care about the weak and the marginalised, much as early Christianity did. And, after all, we all want to help the poor and the disadvantaged.<\/p>\n But there is another side to it. It is an anti-liberal ideology that undermines freedom of expression, judges people according to the group to which they belong (identity politics), places morality above truth in science, and obstructs democratic dialogue by treating opponents as demons with whom one cannot even speak. In short, it is a system that is incompatible with Western liberal democracies and far closer to a form of totalitarianism.<\/p>\n \u201cIf religion ceases to tell us what is right and wrong, the woke\u2014or some other ideology\u2014will step in to fulfil that role and fill the void, just as Chesterton foresaw\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You compare modern ideologies to religions. It brings to mind the apocryphal quotation often attributed to Chesterton: \u201cWhen people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing\u2014they believe in anything\u201d. Did religion serve as a kind of bridge between the fragility of the individual and their role as a social being?<\/strong><\/p>\n Jorge Wagensberg used to say that an individual can live perfectly well without religion, but that a society or community cannot. If religion ceases to tell us what is right and wrong, the woke\u2014or some other ideology\u2014will step in to fulfil that role and fill the void, just as Chesterton foresaw.<\/p>\n Can atrocities be justified in the name of good?<\/strong><\/p>\n I touched on this issue earlier when discussing the punitive nature of the human moral mind. Many thinkers throughout history have reflected on this darker side of morality. Let me share a few quotations that express the idea particularly well:<\/p>\n \u201cTo be able to destroy with a clear conscience, to behave badly and call your behaviour \u2018righteous indignation\u2019\u2014this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral pleasures\u201d<\/p>\n -Aldous Huxley<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cIt is much easier to kill a man if you believe that he is evil, and that you are good\u201d<\/p>\n -Hans Georg Moeller, The Moral fool<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cTo do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good\u201d<\/p>\n -Alexander Solzhenitsyn<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cTo inflict cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists\u2014that is why they invented hell\u201d<\/p>\n -Bertrand Russell<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cEvil is never done so thoroughly and so well as when it is done with a good conscience\u201d<\/p>\n -Blaise Pascal<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cViolence is regarded as moral rather than immoral. Across the world and throughout history, more people have been killed in the name of justice than to satisfy greed\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Steven Pinker<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cPerhaps no phenomenon contains so much destructive feeling as \u2018moral indignation\u2019, which allows envy and hatred to masquerade as virtue. The indignant person enjoys, for once, the satisfaction of despising and treating another human being as inferior, together with the feeling of personal superiority and righteousness\u201d<\/p>\n -Erich Fromm<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n How would you characterise the moral justifications currently being introduced into education systems? (The idea that children should be happy<\/em> rather than memorise and learn; the promotion of inclusive classrooms with different learning paces; the undermining of the teacher’s moral authority, and so on.)<\/strong><\/p>\n I have not devoted much time to studying or reflecting on morality and education, which is a gap in my knowledge that I shall have to address. That said, my general impression is that moral justifications are being introduced into education systems in an increasingly explicit and systematic way.<\/p>\n These justifications are usually presented with good intentions: prioritising children’s happiness over effort and memorisation, adapting teaching to \u201cdifferent learning paces\u201d, promoting inclusion above all else, questioning the teacher’s moral authority, or avoiding any form of \u201chierarchy\u201d or \u201cjudgement\u201d. The problem is not the desire for children to be happy or respected, but rather turning the school into a primarily therapeutic and moralising environment instead of a place centred on the transmission of knowledge and the development of critical thinking.<\/p>\n \u201cTurning education into a tool of moral engineering strikes me as a profound mistake and, in the long run, one that is harmful both to pupils and to society\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n My basic view is that we should avoid introducing morality\u2014or ideology\u2014into more institutions than is strictly necessary. Hypermoralisation tends to be counterproductive. Science offers a clear example. Its guiding distinction is between true and false. If we replace that with good and bad, we lose the ability to understand reality objectively. Something similar happens in education. Its primary purpose should not be to produce morally \u201ccorrect\u201d individuals according to the standards of the day, but to transmit knowledge, develop intellectual skills and cultivate minds capable of thinking for themselves. Put simply, I do not believe that the role of the school is to indoctrinate pupils.<\/p>\n I believe that moral education is fundamentally the responsibility of families, since they are best placed to understand their children’s circumstances, values and particular situations. Schools, for their part, should teach civility, respect and honesty\u2014qualities that are essential to any orderly society\u2014but they should not become vehicles for ideological indoctrination.<\/p>\n Teaching gender ideology, climate activism, theories of identity, or any other moral worldview as though they were unquestionable truths is not part of the educational mission. That does not mean that such issues cannot be discussed, but they should be presented rigorously, from a plurality of perspectives, and without any attempt to shape pupils’ moral consciences.<\/p>\n Ultimately, schools should cultivate independent and capable minds, not believers in a particular secular morality. Respect for the law and the basic rules of civic coexistence is, of course, essential. But turning education into a tool of moral engineering strikes me as a profound mistake and, in the long run, one that is harmful both to pupils and to society.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n\n
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