There are two parts to Stephen Colbert's morality. First, he has a reactive stress system. He sees threats around every corner, showing that his primitive survival systems are constantly activated. This is "bunker morality" that represents the most primitive moral sense that humans display (sorry, Stephen!).
When ancient emotion systems take charge, your moral choices narrow. You prefer to attack instead of introspect. You become a gorilla-yes, one of our cousins, but not representative of our best selves. Bunker morality focuses on territoriality, struggles for power, deception, and maintenance of past routines and precedent (MacLean, 1990). Emotion systems related to fear, rage and seeking (exploring) and dominance reside here (Panksepp, 1998). For example, when safety is threatened, the sympathetic system can trigger a fight response (rage system). Gorilla tactics attempts to trigger terror in the attacked (the parasympathetic system that induces freezing for reducing pain and the likelihood of bodily destruction).
Bunker morality is based primarily in instincts that revolve around survival and thriving in context, instincts shared with all animals and present from birth. Bunker morality is focused on self safety. It cannot reach out to another person in a respectful, "here and now" manner. It can be narcissistic, interpreting everything according to how it affects the individual and/or ethnocentric, interpreting everything according to how it affects the unvarnished group identity.
When not tempered by other ethics, bunker morality is prone to gorilla tactics, acting ruthlessly to attain security at any cost, decreasing sensitivity to other, even moral, goals. When people are fearful for their own safety, they are less responsive to helping others (e.g., Mikulincer, Shaver, Gillath, & Nitzberg, 2005) and less able to reason carefully because body energy (hormones, blood flow) is mobilized for safety (fight or flight). An individual can work himself into a frenzy, especially if others around him are doing the same. Bunker morality responds to the safety or dominance wishes of self and ingroup members (real or imaginary) while shutting out the needs of anyone or anything else. Bunker morality focuses on securing survival through such things as ingroup purity (Altemeyer 2006) or ingroup maintenance of hierarchy (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996; Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989). We can see bunker morality on display when regular people become violent or aggressive towards others. To the person in bunker morality mode, these actions seem moral.
Bunker morality can become activated in anyone. When threat is salient, individuals are more attracted to strongmen and tough policies on outsiders (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003;), as happened in the USA after 9/11/2001 (Pyszczynski, Solomon, Greenberg, Maxfield, & Cohen, 2004)--any questioning of a strong military response or delving into complex causes of the 9/11 attack was condemned as unpatriotic (traitorous). Such single-mindedness can lead not only to decreased sensitivity towards those who get in the way of efforts to stay safe or dominant, but an inability to change course, reflecting Simone Weil's view, "Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty" (1947/1952). At the same time, what is considered evil by outsiders may be considered virtues or highly-prized principles by insiders (Skitka's ‘moral mandates;' Skitka & Morgan, 2009), such as allegiant ingroup loyalty (me vs. not-me, not the loyalty of love), obedience, and self-control of soft emotion. There is nobleness in submitting to an authority figure and "completing the mission," or accomplishing a goal considered valuable by the tradition (e.g., military service). This us-against-them morality is dangerous to anyone outside the ingroup (us) and anyone in the ingroup who does not toe the line.
This is exhausting, taking most of a person's energy. There is little energy left to think or act in prosocial ways or think very carefully. Truthiness suffices. Such a physiological orientation is supported and perpetuated by a cultural viewpoint that we discuss next.
Previous Next
References
Altemeyer, B. (2006). The authoritarians. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.
Jost, J.T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A.W., & Sulloway, F.J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375.
MacLean, P. (1990). The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. New York: Plenum.
Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P.R., Gillath, O. & Nitzberg, R.A. (2005). Attachment, caregiving, and altruism: boosting attachment security increases compassion and helping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89 (5), 817-839.
Narvaez, D. (October, 2006). The Neurobiological roots of our multiple moral personalities. Notre Dame Symposium on Character and Moral Personality.
Narvaez, D. (2008). Triune ethics: The neurobiological roots of our multiple moralities. New Ideas in Psychology, 26, 95-119.
Nisbett, R.& Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of honor. New York: Westview Press.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Maxfield, M., & Cohen, F. (2004). Fatal Attraction. The effects of mortality salience on evaluations of charismatic, task-oriented, and relationship-oriented leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32 (4), 525-537.
Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg J., Solomon S., Pyszczynski, T.., & Lyon D. (1989). Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(4), 681-90.
Skitka, L.J., & Morgan, G. S. (2009). The Double-edged Sword of a Moral State of Mind. In D. Narvaez & D. K. Lapsley, (Eds.) Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology (pp. 355-375). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Weil, S. (1947/1952). Gravity and Grace. New York: Routledge Kegan Paul.
