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20 / 07 / 2004
José Antonio Marina (Professor of Ethics): "Western societies are psychologically and ethically disoriented"
This morning the Forum Dialogue "Social Brain. Biology of Conflicts and Cooperation" ended with the session that analyzed the paths towards coexistence.
The professor of ethics, philosopher and writer, José Antonio Marina, spoke about his experience as an education professional. In this respect, Marina explained that "there is no gene for aggressiveness, but there is a gene that allows humans to be able to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way." The problem for Marina is that "we are cutting human beings into pieces and we forget about the whole. We must think about the context." Marina said that we have greatly improved in the syntactic knowledge of the brain "but we have progressed little in the semantic knowledge of the brain."
Marina added that language "is a point of inflection and our intelligence is structurally linguistic. Western societies suffer from a huge process of psychological and ethical disorientation while Orientals place more importance on the group than on the individual." For Marina, "our social intelligence imposes coexistence in very complex societies and evaluates our behavior."
In this respect, Marina believes that "the role of educators is to teach values so that people can defend themselves from current rulers, such as consumerism." It is important that we reeducate people because we live in a sort of schizophrenic society," Marina added.
The professor highlighted the importance of education because "if we are sure of wanting to end with aggressiveness, we have to create a world where aggressiveness is not needed to survive. Marina proposed "that each person follows the norm that according to our intelligence is the best thing for us, this way we can behave freely." Marina concluded saying that "thinking that we can learn from animals is fantastic" in reference to the studies performed on chimpanzees.
The professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton, Steven Harnad, spoke about categorization and how it influences our behavior. Harnad reminded us that categorization implies the defining of a group and, at the same time, that which remains outside of the group, the complement. For Harnard, things that are part of a group have positive aspects, while that which isn't part of a group has negative connotations. An example of this categorization would be the family, "the closest links are made with our family, with those whom we live with, but all others remain on the outside."
For Harnad, this characterization denotes the egoism of the genes, inclusive survival, and the first display of lineage. Harnad also explained that this categorization causes natural favoritism between the good and the bad, and creates stereotypes. Harnad believes that this happens because we acknowledge the categories, but if we didn't acknowledge them, it would be different. It is as if "we knew what it was like to be awake but we didn't know what it was like to dream. If we were all loved by strangers and not by the family, we would speak about "us" and not "us and them."
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