How values emerge in groups of humans
10 min read by Penev 28 October 2021
Today I watched a YesTheory video about Transnistria, a country on the border between Moldova and Ukraine. The country self-identifies as “the last Soviet republic” and looks very communist-esque. Without going into too much detail, the vloggers meet a very welcoming and generous society. This could be a case of “a few good encounters”, but let’s suppose it is not for the sake of this argument. The whole episode is very heartwarming and beautifully filmed.
Anyway, one of the comments on the video mentioned how the episode reminds them of the described life in the USSR as per the words of the commenter’s grandma. Since I have heard similar things from my grandma, this got me thinking, how do such values of empathy, kindness and hospitality emerge in a culture? They are obviously good, since they make people happier, but what incentivizes people to live and feel with such ideas?
Are they a product of the culture’s history, with a plethora of small factors throughout time adding up to result in a status quo of virtuous thinking? Or perhaps virtue quantity and quality have direct correlations to the mean average rational intelligence of the people, resulting in some kind of wholesome utilitarianism? (…lol)
But Transnistria seems both insignificant historically, as well as intellectually. They tie their national identity to the USSR, and it is widely known that people in this period were poorer than their western counterparts and suffered from worse welfare.
So, at first, I thought that perhaps there might be a connection between these high values and the economic system – Communism. Transnistrians seem to value USSR highly, with the hammer and sickle coat of arms seemingly placed everywhere. And I thought that I might be onto something since generosity and hospitality are not naturally emergent from Capitalism. However, it is obviously total nonsense to attribute the virtues of these people to a system that abuses them. Logically, them being poorer must lead to a more parsimonious attitude which shouldn’t breed generosity but the opposite.
I looked at things from another angle – poorer people seem to be more generous and hospitable in general. I’m sure we can all remember an anecdote from our lives that testimonies to this. This video of the Transnistrian culture seems to be another piece of evidence. And I thought, maybe in these cultures (ex-USSR or in general Eastern Bloc countries) people think “we are all in the same boat, let’s help each other”.
In this direction, I can imagine that people are more willing to be virtuous towards people that they self-identify with, or that they see as part of their group. And that makes perfect sense. The toughest friendships are created in hardship… and, to use an awful cliché, diamonds are created under pressure. Pain seems to bind people together through empathy. Culture-wide oppression leads to mutual dependance and highly interconnected people with an almost nuclear support structure. And from this we can derive generosity and hospitality.
Now we must put this argument to the test. In capitalistic societies, there is better welfare, but also more independence. People live better lives, but since they are more individualistic, they are less inclined to self-identify with the culture or a random neighbor. The permeating cultural group dissimilates into smaller ones, such as “the family” or the immediate circle of friends.
Think of New York, London, or even the Internet, places where people are highly individualistic and unattached to the local culture. That’s where it seems that society is very cold-hearted. In contrast, a small village of people seems to me will almost always be very welcoming and kind.
However, while this may sound nice for a moment, strong affiliation to groups results in a culture of Tribalism. So even though the interconnectedness of people may produce empathy and kindness inside the group, it also prompts gatekeeping, animosity towards other groups and narrow-mindedness. In extreme cases, tribalist mentality becomes a very serious problem and leads to peer pressure, lack of responsibility and even irrational beliefs and actions (looking at you, Abrahamic religions).
It seems that when people are living well under capitalism, they can’t bond over their mutual suffering, but instead choose to group themselves according to completely trivial factors. This unimportant nature of the atomic bonds between group members generally seems to lead to skewed or irrational values when taken to the extreme. Perhaps that is why most innovators and revolutionaries are extremely liberal thinkers that do not excessively self-identify with any group. You need to be able to think beyond the status quo in order to break it.
I’ve always thought it’s a bit too long-winded, but maybe that’s why structuralism is so prevalent in modern philosophy. Since the world has become so massive and so global, the individual is too small of a particle to be considered logically significant. The emergent groups are the real players in sociology. We are all slaves to our nurture, which is defined by the groups we are a part of.
To conclude, going back to the problem of virtues and values, I think empathy and kindness are definitely intrinsic to group dynamics. I worry that in a perfectly egalitarian society each person will be so individualistic that they will feel too different to the others to form meaningful groups. There needs to be common ground to feel empathy and most of the time being human is simply not enough. The internet is evidence enough of that. How do we solve the problem of inter-individual animosity at such a large scale without creating terrorist groups? Perhaps we need to come up with a global challenge for humanity in order for us all to get on the same team.