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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
From Amazon to Tinder, from Google to Deliveroo, there is no facet of human life that the digital revolution has not streamlined and dematerialized. Its objective was to reduce costs by forgoing face-to-face interactions, and it was a direct result of the free-market shock of the 1980s, which sought to expand the marketplace seamlessly in every possible dimension. Today, we can be algorithmically entertained, educated, cared for, and courted in a way that was impossible in the old industrial society, where institutions structured the social world. Today, these institutions have been replaced by monetized virtual contact. As the industrial revolution did in the past, the digital revolution is creating a new economy and a new sensibility, bringing about a radical revaluation of society and its representations. While obsessed with the search for an efficient management of human relations, the new digital capitalism gives rise to an irrational and impulsive Homo Numericus prone to an array of addictive behaviours and subjected to intensive forms of surveillance. Far from producing a new agora, social media produce a radicalization of public debate in which hate-filled speech directed against adversaries becomes the norm. But these outcomes are not inevitable. The digital revolution also offers an exciting path, one that leads to a world in which everyone deserves to be listened to and respected. It explores a new way of living that is historically unprecedented, that of a society based neither on individualism nor on the hierarchical model of earlier civilizations. Are we able to seize the new opportunities opened up by the digital revolution without succumbing to its dark side?
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
Part IThe Digital Illusion
1 Body and Mind
Terminator
Reason and Emotions
The theory of the mind
Descartes’ ‘Error’
Spinoza was right
The limits of human reasoning
Artificial Intelligence
Learning to learn
Wisdom
Notes
2 Stultify and Punish
Wild Thought
Just fucking
Surveillance Capitalism
Googlenomics
Notes
3 Waiting for the Robots
The Death of Kings
The Industrialization of Services
The self-driving car
The Thinking Robot
Recruit and judge
A digital morality?
The Stake of the Century
Notes
4 Political Anomie
Impoverishing Growth
Working-Class Suicide
Return to Durkheim
Contemporary anomie
A Political Revolution
Hatred of democracy
Vox populi
The wisdom of crowds
Beliefs and information
Playing lotto and buying insurance policies
Notes
Part IIThe Return of Reality
5 Social Ties
The Law of 150 Friends
Bonobos and Chimpanzees
Confidence and reciprocity
In the company of strangers
‘Belonging’ to an institution
Four Possible Societies
The hunter-gatherers
Agrarian societies
Religion has been dying for a long time
The Secular Age
The industrial mentality
The sixties
The Triumph of Endogamy
Being with one’s own kind
The Postmodern Mentality
In praise of archaism
Notes
6 Winter Is Coming
The Crises of the Twenty-First Century
Vaccines and anti-vaxxers
The age of catastrophes
The Climatic Clock
Collapse
Collapsology
Enlightened catastrophism
The Society of Addiction
Notes
7 In a Hundred Years
The Society of Abundance
The great hope of the twenty-first century
Back to Science Fiction
Wisdom and beauty
Maternal love
Notes
By Way of Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Homo Numericus
The Coming ‘Civilization’
Daniel Cohen
Translated by Steven Rendall
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Homo numericus. La ‘civilisation’ qui vient © Editions Albin Michel – Paris 2022
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6021-9 – hardback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
Thinking of Suzanne
Acknowledgements
This book has benefitted immensely from the friendly, in-depth re-readings by Roland Bénabou and Francis Wolff; constant encouragement by Gilles Haéri and Alexandre Wickham, an eternal friend; Alexandre Cadain’s valuable insights and the care taken with my manuscript by Marie-Pierre Coste-Billon and her team at Albin Michel. I think of Roger Godino and Henri Weber, whose commentaries I would have so much liked to hear. This book is dedicated to Suzanne Srodogora.
Introduction
In one of the most striking episodes of Black Mirror, a hit British TV series, a young woman loses her husband in a car accident on the same day that she learns she is pregnant with his child. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which combs through his telephone calls, videos, and emails, he is resuscitated digitally, perfectly, with his intonations, intuitions, replies to her questions, etc. The series’ power is based on the fact that it seems to be only one step beyond what is currently possible. It explores our ability to accept the influence of new technologies, on the hypothesis that the latter’s limits will be less technical than social and psychological.
The idea that the dead can be resuscitated by drawing on their ‘history’ is both totally terrifying and perfectly credible. The software programs powered by AI dive into the personality of their users, and, by recognizing the intonations of their voices, the complexion of their faces, and identifying the armature of their vocabulary, they grasp people’s temperaments and aspirations. Much of the recruiting for a job or for admission to a university now takes place online. AI preselects, from a list of applicants that may run to many thousands of people, the few candidates who will have the good fortune to speak, in the last stage of the process, with a human evaluator. Even love does not escape being put through this mill. As the sociologist Eva Illouz brilliantly shows, applications such as Tinder make it possible to industrialize love relationships by reducing the amount of time spent on courtship, limiting love to ‘just fucking’! Emotions, desires, and fears are subjected to new algorithms that wholly transform affective relationships. A new economy, a new sensibility, new ideologies: like the great transformation produced by the Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution is bringing about a radical revaluation of society and its representations.
In the new society that is dawning, the goal is no longer to buy objects such as vacuum cleaners or washing machines, but rather to consume one’s own fantasies, whether individual or collective. In economic terms, we could say that the digital revolution is ‘industrializing post-industrial society’ – the latter term designating a world in which the essence of activity no longer consists in cultivating land or producing manufactured goods, but in taking care of human beings themselves, of their bodies and their fantasies. On the Internet, everything is done to ensure that people can be entertained, educated, cared for, or courted at the lowest possible cost.
In an utterly unanticipated way, the Covid pandemic has served as a catalyst for this great transformation. It is firms such as Amazon, Apple, and Netflix that have emerged victorious from this crisis – firms whose capitalization on the stock market exploded during the lockdowns. They made it possible to work from home and buy merchandise without having to go to a shop, to be entertained without going to a theatre or a concert hall. Digital capitalism’s goal became clear to everyone: it is to reduce the cost of physical interactions to a minimum. To generate profit, it dematerializes human relationships.
Algorithms play, on the scale of society, the role that used to be played by the assembly line in the organization of industrial work. It is not only the management of bodies that is optimized; people’s psyches are also ‘Taylorized’. Search engines guide web users towards sites where they can find dating partners or opinions that are supposed to be well suited to them, thereby confining them in practice to new digital ghettos. Although obsessed by the search for an ‘efficient’ management of human relations, the new capitalism creates, in a completely contradictory manner, an irrational, impulsive Homo numericus. ‘Too many images, sounds, and stimuli provoke concentration deficits, symptoms of hyperactivity, and addictive behaviours’, Michel Desmurget writes in an appropriately titled book: La Fabrique du crétin digital (‘The digital cretin factory’). Far from producing a new agora, a site for discussion where ideas are circulated and exchanged, social networks lead to a completely unforeseen radicalization of public debate. Hate-filled speech directed against adversaries has become the norm of these new ‘conversations’. What is sought on the Net is not information, but beliefs that are consumed like an ordinary commodity, each individual finding in the great digital storehouse the truth that suits him, as in Pirandello’s play.
Unless we lapse into a determinism maintaining that technology, and it alone, holds the key to civilizations, the current transformation cannot be understood if one fails to grasp the historical process of which it is an element. The digital revolution pushes to its peak the disintegration of the institutions that structured industrial society, as far as enterprises themselves, labour unions, political parties, or the media are concerned. This process is itself the direct result of the free-market shock of the 1980s, which sought to expand the marketplace and competition in every possible dimension, without mediations, without intermediary bodies. Working from home, which might prove to be Covid’s most durable legacy, is part of a long process of externalizing tasks and individualizing remunerations. But in a subliminal way, digital society also draws on the counterculture of the 1960s and its critique of the verticality of power and institutions. Defeated by the free-market revolution, the spirit of the sixties wanders like a ghost through social networks, lending them a resolutely anti-system tone even if they have become the system. As the American sociologist Fredric Jameson said regarding modernity, the present transition offers a kind of ‘compensation’ for the political failure of the cultural revolution by adopting its language. The biblical Isaac could say: ‘It’s Dylan’s voice and Thatcher’s hand.’1
The digital human who inherits this strange filiation is caught in the trap of a society reduced to the aggregation of individuals trying to escape their isolation by constituting fictive communities. Nonetheless, the idea of a society offering every individual an opportunity to engage alone in countless parallel conversations is a myth that is exhausting to bear. The French gilets jaunes (‘Yellow Vests’) noisily made it clear that social solitude is the deepest ache there is (it is even the cause of suicides, according to Durkheim, the father of French sociology), and that virtual links do not heal us of the desire to live in flesh and blood among humans. ‘People live beyond their psychic means’, said the psychoanalyst Pierre Legendre. The observation is striking and can be generalized: in reality, people live beyond their means, period, whether those means are psychological or ecological. Reality, however, is never far away. One after the other, the Yellow Vests, the Covid pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine have reminded us, in their own way, that life is not a video game.
In its own perverse way, however, the digital revolution also sketches an exciting path: the one that leads to a world in which everyone deserves to be listened to. It explores a new way of living that is unprecedented in the history of civilizations – that of a society that seeks to be simultaneously horizontal and secular: without the verticality that still prevailed in industrial society and without the religiosity of agrarian societies; closer, perhaps, to the hunters and gatherers, but without the superstitions, if possible.
It’s a long road, simply to understand what such a utopia means. We have to take up this challenge and make the unheard-of imaginative effort of conceiving a desirable society with the means given to us by the society we want to leave.
Notes
1
Genesis 27:22: ‘The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’
Part IThe Digital Illusion
1Body and Mind
Terminator
Archimedes asked for a lever to lift the Earth. In its turn, the digital age, like the industrial revolutions that preceded it, aims at a simple objective: making human labour more ‘productive’. However, the fundamental difference from the revolutions of the past consists in this: it is human beings themselves who are both the lever and the mass to be lifted. An exciting and terrifying dialogue between two eminent experts on intelligence, Yann Le Cun and Stanislas Dehaene – who seem influenced as much by science fiction as by biology – shows us what is going on:
SD: Personally, I’m a believer in the interface between the brain and machines. I believe that connecting the brain to supplementary systems by means of rapid interfaces will allow it to be more effective. And this combination will be difficult to beat for a long time.
YLC: Yes!
SD: A chip that is grafted onto the brain injects signals sensitive to the direction of the magnetic field, and suddenly the rat orients himself better in space, as do pigeons.
YLC: I don’t believe in replacement, but rather in displacement. Cosmic evolution always moves toward more complexity. Intelligence evolves but doesn’t have to remain strictly human.
Reading this dialogue, people could be convinced that the film Terminator had an influence on scientific thought – except that the idea of allowing human brains to communicate with machines is no longer illusory. In 2018, an implant placed in the brain of a quadriplegic enabled him to control, by means of thought, an exoskeleton that helped him to walk.1 Armies all over the world are not the last to take an interest in this promise of a mixture of human flesh and silicon … The newspaper Le Monde reported an incredible account of an ‘augmented soldier’ with chips placed under his skin that allowed him to send or receive information at a distance in a theatre of war. By 2030, these developments might take the form of ‘operations on ears to enable them to hear very high or very low frequencies, or of implants making it possible to take control of a weapons system’.2
Aware of the debates that this evolution might provoke, the French Comité d’éthique de la défense (Defence Ethics Committee), composed of eighteen civilian and military members, took the trouble to formulate about twenty recommendations. For each ‘augmentation’ of soldiers, a risk/benefit analysis will have to be conducted; it would involve taking into account the side effects that ‘a certain number of rays or electronic components might have on the body’. The reversibility of these augmentations will also have to be studied. ‘Any augmentation that is thought to be of such a nature as to […] provoke a loss of humanity or would be contrary to the principle of the dignity of the human person’ should be prohibited. The military’s ethics committee also prohibits any ‘cognitive augmentations [that] might affect the free will that the soldier must have in battle’. Similarly, ‘eugenic or genetic practices that would endanger the re-integration [of the soldier] into society upon his return to civilian life’ should also be proscribed. This will certainly reassure us!
We must take seriously these moments in history when science fiction intersects with the military imagination. Battlefields have always provided theatres of experimentation for the most revolutionary technologies. The Internet and GPS are recent examples that have emerged from the files of the United States’ Department of Defense. But technologies are not adopted and developed in a void; they have to satisfy a social need. Google Glasses were a technological marvel that flopped. Facebook, on the other hand, was a gadget for immature male students (making it possible to select the prettiest girls on the campus) that has conquered the world!
In both cases, we must ask ourselves why. Describing the way the emerging society turns our lives and mentalities upside down requires us to avoid two symmetrical traps. The first involves attributing to technologies an autonomous power they do not generally have. The second consists, inversely, in underestimating their disruptive capacities, the shortcuts that they lead us to take, often in response to imbalances they themselves provoke. The gap between the inventors’ initial intentions and the use to which their inventions are ultimately put can be gigantic. Our uncertainty when faced by inventions as radical as AI, as in the past with the printing press or television, is the result of, among other essential things, a simple fact: societies are not inanimate beings. They respond to new technologies in ways that cannot be fully predicted.
To describe the digital revolution is not to tell the story of a destiny announced or undergone. It is to explore its virtualities, to gauge its risks, in order to acquire the means to dominate it. That is the true challenge.
Reason and Emotions
When humans began working on assembly line, they became machines. Today, with AI, it’s the machine that is becoming human. It can increase our cognitive or mechanical abilities, but it can also lead to making us dispensable. There are no longer any ticket-punchers at the entrances to tube stations, and no doubt there will soon no longer be any cashiers at supermarket exits. Confronted with the formidable power of computers and AI, what advantage can humans claim to have? Will we have to implant electrodes in humans’ heads to help them keep their position? Or will humans specialize in the tasks that the machine is not capable of performing: loving, laughing or weeping, at the risk of letting algorithms take charge of the system’s collective intelligence? Answering these questions requires nothing less than a return to the questions that philosophy and biology have been exploring for centuries: what are humans, no longer relative to gods or animals, but relative to the technologies they have themselves produced?
A simple observation: a human is a body and a mind, while a machine is neither one nor the other. A human is a mind, first of all: he produces, spontaneously, theories about the world. By the age of 9 months, a baby has assimilated the laws of gravitation: he throws his toys to see if they fall as expected. Very early, a child differentiates between inanimate objects and living beings. After seeing two or three elephants, the child immediately grasps the concept of this strange animal and can recognize it in his picture books. A machine cannot do these things spontaneously. It needs to scan several million elephants to recognize just one. A driver completely inexperienced on a mountain road knows that he has to avoid the ravine, even if he has never before fallen into it. A machine needs millions of virtual crashes to understand that it has to keep the car on the road. It isn’t as brilliant as one might imagine it to be!
The specificity of humans is to produce theories about everything: about wind, stars, themselves … Life is too short for our comprehension of the world to be deduced only from lived experiences. We need concepts to orient ourselves in a world filled with mysteries. As we are reminded by Richard Thaler, an economist who received the Nobel Prize for his work on behavioural economics, humans have limited time and limited intelligence. They employ intuitive rules to judge and decide. We do not live in a world like Bill Murray’s in the film Groundhog Day (1993). The character played by Murray wakes every morning to re-live the same day. Once he has understood the totality of the world’s possibilities, he can act knowing the consequences of his acts and win the heart of his colleague, played by Andie MacDowell. The hero of Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) asks himself a question of the same kind: ‘Is it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone? A human can never know what he has to know because he has only one life, and he can’t compare it to earlier lives or rectify it in later lives.’ Kundera concludes that human life is like a drama in which you have to act without ever having rehearsed it. You can’t go back in time to correct your errors. You have to act, relying on your intuitions alone.
The theory of the mind
Humans do not think alone, they think with others, in conversation with them. Francis Wolff speaks of the ‘dialogic’ nature of man.3 It is in these discussions with other people, when demands are made on us by our interlocutor, that we feel awake. Reason becomes sharper when we seek to construct arguments to convince others, and that at the same time allow us to fight our own prejudices. Moreover, it is in the form of an imaginary dialogue with ourselves that we organize our thought, in solitude. The mirror stage, when the child recognizes himself in the mirror’s reflection, is in this respect crucial: he sees himself as he understands he is seen by others. Humans share this trait with primates. A chimpanzee looking into a mirror removes the confetti that has been put on his forehead. In the ape, there is also a zone of the brain that lights up when he is shown a film in which his fellows appear. It is amusing to note a curiosity stressed by the biologist Alain Prochiantz: shown a Western by Sergio Leone, macaques react more than humans do!4 A strong activation of the prefrontal areas is observed in an ape when it is shown The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – an activation that is completely absent with humans. But that probably tells us more about Sergio Leone’s Westerns than it does about our simian cousins.
‘I know that you think that I’m thinking about you’, expresses a (partly contradictory) thought that only a human can conceive. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has perfectly summed up what is at stake.5 So-called first-order intentionality is defined as having the ability to reflect on the content of one’s own mind, as is shown by the use of the verbs ‘suppose’, ‘think’, ‘wonder’, ‘believe’, etc. Most mammals and birds probably fit in that category. More interesting are the cases in which the individual is capable of representing the mental state of someone else, to say: ‘I know that you like apricots.’ This ability defines a higher level of intentionality, conventionally called ‘second-order’. It is the equivalent of the stage that children reach around the age of 6, when they acquire for the first time what specialists in cognitive sciences call the ‘theory of the mind’. They understand that other people can have ideas different from their own.
‘I know that you think that I’m thinking about you’ characterizes a third level of intentionality. How far can one go on like that? The economist George Loewenstein has given a very eloquent example of fourth-level intentionality: you broke your ankle and you would like your colleague to come and get you in a car [level 1]. You suppose that she knows that you are suffering [2]. But she herself is not sure that you know whether she knows it [3]. On the strength of this supposed ignorance, she doesn’t come to help you. And that is what you reproach her for: pretending not to know your situation in order not to help you [4]6 (with the successive orders of intentionality indicated between square brackets).
Dunbar defends the idea that humans can aspire to a fifth-order intentionality. The fifth order corresponds to being able to say: I suppose [1] that you believe [2] that I want [3] you to think [4] that I intend to threaten you … [5].
Shakespeare’s genius makes us reach these summits. In Othello, Shakespeare uses four states of mind: Iago wants Othello to believe that Desdemona loves Cassio, and that Cassio loves her. But Shakespeare himself has to persuade the audience to believe all that. In addition – and this matters – he has to imagine everything himself; he must be capable of working – at a minimum – with a sixth-order intentionality: he wants the audience to understand that Iago wants Othello to believe …, etc. Only a human (and not just any human!) is capable of such a feat.
In these mirror games with other people’s thought, a quality emerges that is exclusively human: producing fiction. Animals simply can’t understand what a story is – not only because they don’t have the language for doing so, but because they wouldn’t be capable of understanding what it is. If they had a language, they would take the story they are told at face value, being incapable of comprehending the account of a world that does not exist. With cognitive capacities limited to second-order intentionality, a chimpanzee could write and think ‘Iago is going to leave’, but it could not understand that in fact Iago would like it to be thought that he is going to leave. Only humans can produce a literature of the kind that we associate with culture. As Nancy Huston puts it magnificently in The Tale-Tellers: A Short Study of Humankind: ‘No one has ever come across a human population that was content to live in reality – i.e. without religion, taboo, ritual, genealogy, fairy-tales, magic, stories – i.e., without recourse to the imagination, without confabulations.’7 The first comparative advantage of humans, in the language of economists, is involved here: humans can invent a world that does not exist. The problem is that they can also believe that it does.
Because humans are both creative and credulous.
Descartes’ ‘Error’
To understand the potential role of machines in relation to humans, we must add another decisive element: a human is not simply a mind. Unlike machines, humans think in a body. As Miguel Benasayag perfectly sums it up: ‘the body is the site of passions, drives, long-term memory; it is where the memory of my parents or grandparents is reincarnated’.8 The idea that humans function like automatons, as people believed in the eighteenth century, or as an assemblage of units of information, as theorists of cybernetics suggest, is no longer current among researchers. ‘It is the emotions that guide us toward food or a sex partner’, says Benasayag. Beyond these carnal needs, the human species has a ‘physical’ desire to know. On the other hand, stress inhibits capacities for action. An individual who has suffered an intense emotional shock – for example, a bombardment – will be seized by panic on seeing a match burst into flame.9
In a book entitled Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (2006), Antonio Damasio shows that it is emotion that confers on living beings their capacity for action. To illustrate his remark, Damasio tells the story of a nineteenth-century medical case involving a certain Phineas Gage, whose archives have made it possible to reconstruct his destiny. Gage was the leader of a team building railways when, at the age of 25, his head was pierced by an iron bar in an accidental error while handling an explosive. The point of the bar, which passed through Gage’s head, weighed 6 kilograms! Gage survived, and two months later he seemed to have recovered. He regained his senses of touch, hearing, and vision, but his temperament had changed. He became irreverent and swore (which he never did before), and he no longer showed respect for his friends. ‘Gage’s body was alive, but it was to be inhabited by a new soul.’ Thus, it appeared to the medical profession that, following a cerebral lesion, one might lose respect for social conventions, even though neither the intellectual functions nor language had been altered.
Another surprising change in Gage’s personality also occurred. He conceived a great many projects, but succeeded in realizing none of them. His ability to foresee the future had completely disappeared. One of Damasio’s patients, Eliott, who had a brain tumour, experienced the same concomitance of troubles: despite intact mental abilities, he found it impossible to make decisions, to plan efficiently his activities in the coming hours. The lesion on the prefrontal cortex was again responsible for this. Eliott was able to know things, but could not feel them. He could elaborate sophisticated plans but was no longer capable of deciding which one to choose. Foreseeing an uncertain future and programming our actions accordingly, as well as regulating our life in society, thus seem to be deeply dependent on our ability to feel emotions, love or hate, stress or soothing calm. We humans have to ‘feel’ things before deciding what is good for us. Most important questions, like ‘Must I accept this job, in this city?’ are not settled with the help of a comparative list of advantages and disadvantages. They are decided by the emotions that they imprint on our body. It is the body that gives its opinion, and says: ‘Go for it!’
Spinoza was right
If, in a first book, Damasio points out ‘Descartes’ error’, in a second one he explains that ‘Spinoza was right.’ Baruch Spinoza is the thinker who illuminates in the most striking way this indivisible unity of body and mind. For him, humans are not governed by reason but by desire, which he designates as ‘conatus’: the effort to ‘persevere in its being’. Desire is not passion: the latter is born of an inappropriate desire, connected with ‘inadequate’ ideas. If I am in love and I’m dying of jealousy, it’s because the relationship is wrong. Wisdom consists in converting our passions into actions that make us move forwards, that increase our ability to act, by understanding what is good for us. Spinoza proposed a typology of the affects on the basis of a simple dichotomy: joy and sadness. Joy breaks out when someone increases his abilities to act. Conversely, sadness occurs when he feels deprived of the latter. People are usually not aware of the causes that lead them to desire this or that. Nonetheless, they are perfectly capable of associating their desires with either external or internal causes. Thus, Spinoza defines love as a joy that accompanies the idea of an external cause.10 The close link between the body and the mind is forged in this association between an emotion and the idea that accompanies it, gives it its meaning, and defines us as human beings.
For biologists such as Damasio, emotions are regulative mechanisms. Sadness reminds us of the value of life, while fear alerts us to danger. According to Paul Ekman (whose theories inspired the marvellous Disney-Pixar film Vice-Versa), people generally recognize six primary emotions: joy, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Ekman shows that these emotions are found in all cultures. He himself studied the tribes of Papua – New Guinea. When he showed his interlocutors photos of faces expressing each of the six basic emotions, all of them were immediately recognized. He inferred from this that the primary emotions are predetermined, which is also confirmed by the fact that people who are congenitally blind, and thus have no visual experience, smile and weep exactly like sighted people.
Immersion in society later fabricates moral emotions. Similarly, guilt, shame, and gratitude play a regulative role in life in society. Guilt arises when we worry about the consequences of our own acts on others.11 Shame marks the weight of social judgement – it expresses the fear of a divorce between one’s personal values and those of others. Finally, gratitude testifies to a sense of obligation to others, which promotes empathy, compassion, and generosity. Moral emotions are the regulators of life in society.12
