There was a recent post by someone on Facebook about hating all
Muslims, which is xenophobia. That is obviously an emotional response. I read a
book the Righteous Mind written by Jonathan
Haidt recently that reviews the findings of many psychological studies. Humans
have subconscious instantaneous responses to people and to situations. After
the flush of emotion, reason takes over in an attempt to explain or justify to
our responded—a fight between what is innate and what we have learned. We mold
our emotions by reason; biases come into play to modify the emotional response
to make them come out in a way that usually guides us to respond in a
culturally or politically correct manner. We make our responses fit the way we personally
want them to come out.
We do not grab hands full of food and put them in our mouths
to satisfy hunger. We use knifes and forks and plates and sit at a table. We do
not succumb to reproductive desires whenever the urge arises. We recognize others have rights. We do not run
from neighbors we see everyday but are prepared to fight off strangers.
Although the book did not delve deeply into evolutionary psychology,
it was obvious our emotions are a product of our evolution; they are an outgrowth
of the Darwian inspired survival of the fittest. Our emotions are the first
line of defense. Biologists argue about natural selection of the individual
verses natural selection of the group. Most of them accept the survival benefits
of natural selection for the individual and now, more and more are accepting that
natural selection of the individual can benefit survival of the group—the idea
that one person would sacrifice his or her life to save the species, which
would be extreme altruism. Individual adapt to other individuals in contrast to
groups adapting to other groups. Rather than species, most non-biologists would
understand the concept better if I substituted other words for species such as
child, then family, then tribe, then state and then nation; a person might be
willing to sacrifice their life to save their “group”. For example, we hear or
see people who say or do whatever it would take to protect “my child, my
family, my, nation my religion”. Like all animals, we are constantly on the
lookout for threats. Experiments have proved that some of us are more sensitive
and responsive threats than others are.
Start with what seems to be a completely unreasonable situation
cited above; a man saying he hates Muslims. When asked why, I would expect a
vague answer along the lines of, “I do not know why, I just do.” He cannot understand
the reason for his hate. Therefore, his reasoning cannot overcome his emotion. The
lack of a reason for his hate would suggest it is something innate or instinctual
in that person. Suppose I said, I am a duck hunter and you asked me why. Ducks
do not pose a threat to me or my family. I don’t hate ducks. Ducks are
beautiful birds so why kill them. The only reason I could “reasonably” have to
hunt ducks is that I have a hunger that can be reasonable overcome by hunting.
It is how animals survive. It is how man survives. That is what anthropologists
who study us mean when they use the expression, ‘hunter-gatherer’.
This probably means this person has retained an emotion related
to fear of strangers that he has not overcome by reason. What is it about Muslims
that this person who hates them, does not like? The most common answer I come
across when talking to people like him is that Muslims kill Christians. This is
ridiculous. This person does not know all Muslims; in fact, he may not know even
one. If duck hunters killed individual ducks because they did not like them, they
would have to know them all to know if he should kill them or not. Rather, it
has nothing to do with the ducks; they hunt ducks because it is instinctual
which come from the same place fear of strangers comes from and that is deep
within the genome. If our Muslim hating friend has what most of us would
consider to be a “hypersensitivity” to strangers, he more than likely fears black
people, Native Americans, Asians, and Latinos. More than likely, this person
associates with a small tent political party. There is a limit to the length of
these posts or I would go into the idea that people like him do not really fear
anything—they just get a bigger gun.
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