The Problem of Imaginative Resistance
Why is it that we, as humans, have absolutely no problem setting aside our notions of reality in order to temporarily believe in monsters, dragons, fairy godmothers, or talking animals, yet we have such a hard time even temporarily dismissing our moral beliefs in the same manner? Our brains have the capacity to assimilate real-world facts as well as fictional facts, and maintain a logical barrier between the two. Yet, even at times when we know we’re being told fiction, stretches in moral judgment are just not allowable. To give an example, we can look at the following passages:
Joseph was overcome with lust, and could no longer control it. He slowly opened Sarah’s door. She was sitting on the bed wearing nothing but a towel. He thought back to the many times she had resisted his pleadings. With a growl, he charged into the room to take her virginity forcefully.
It doesn’t take a saint to immediately recognize that Joseph’s actions are selfish and immoral, but the facts presented are believable. If you were to read this passage in a book detailing the life of a fictional serial killer, would your mind resist assimilating it? Surely not. Now, let’s change the passage:
Joseph was overcome with lust, and could no longer control it. He slowly opened Sarah’s door. She was sitting on the bed wearing nothing but a towel. The best thing for him to do would be to force her to have sex. After all, she was only a girl, and couldn’t be expected to know what she really wanted. With a growl, he charged into the room to take her virginity.
To temporarily believe in talking dragons with magical powers takes absolutely no effort on the part of the reader, but to believe that Joseph was justified in raping Sarah seems to be, for most people, an impossible stretch of the imagination. A writer could weave tales of murder, lies, torture, and damnation, and the reader would likely be captivated, but the writer apparently must leave the moral assessments to the reader, because if those moral assessments create any sort of moral or emotional dissonance, the imagination will hit a solid wall. The problem of imaginative resistance dates back to David Hume in his famous essay, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), in which he poses the following puzzle:
“Whatever speculative errors may be found in the polite writings of any age or country, they detract but little from the value of those compositions. There needs but a certain turn of thought or imagination to make us enter into all the opinions, which then prevailed, and relish the sentiments or conclusions derived from them. But a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom has been familiarized. And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard, by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever.”
Tomar Szabó Gendler of Syracuse University analyzed the theory a great deal further by first suggesting a sharp distinction between belief and make belief. Belief consists of real-world suppositions that we take for truth. Most of us agree that murder is wrong, and would never believe even a religious leader who told us that it was right (one would hope). Likewise, we know that the world is round, and would never believe a scientist who suddenly told us that it was flat. These concepts would simply be too contradictory to our current schema for our minds to accept them. By contrast, in the world of make-belief, we can bring ourselves to believe that the world is flat. However, contradictions to our own moral assessments, such as those regarding murder, remain off-limits even in the realm of make-belief. This is the puzzle, but why is it so?
I believe the answer to this question is much simpler than one might realize, and requires just a moment of introspection. When I read that Joseph is a rapist in the example above, it makes me uncomfortable, just as watching news about rape on television often makes me uncomfortable. Here, though, I have a target for my distaste: Joseph. In my mind, he becomes the enemy – the ‘bad guy’ of the story. This much is believable. When the author tells me that Joseph’s actions are justified, however, the level of discomfort becomes too great, and if I’m to believe the author’s judgment that Joseph is the “good guy”, then I’m left with no target for my distaste. This leaves me with a feeling of uneasiness from the unresolved tension. I’m left with the options to either accept Joseph’s actions as right, and relate to his point of view, or to discard the story altogether. Most people will take the second option.
In this new light, the contradiction of imaginative resistance seems to erode. Is there really a contradiction? Perhaps the scenario can be arranged in a much more suitable manner. My proposal is this: Before we distinguish between belief and make-belief, let’s distinguish between that which we believe to be moral, and that which we believe to be immoral. As humans, it is apparent that we prefer sharp distinctions. We don’t like fuzzy lines or gray areas. We want good and evil, right and wrong. That which is easily categorized is much more convenient for us. Typically, we like to think that murder is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Sacrilege, by most people’s standards, is wrong. Being a good parent is right. Contributing to society is right. Respecting authority, by most people’s standards, is right.
Now that we’ve first distinguished the moral from the immoral, let’s now take a look at belief and make-belief by first considering real-world belief. When America watched the World Trade Center bombings on television, of course they believed it really happened – the footage was proof. When they were told that Osama bin Laden was behind it, the people needed no proof – it was believable, and more importantly, it gave them the ‘bad guy’ they need, and therefore, it was believed. When George Bush repeatedly called the terrorists the ‘evil-doers’, again, the majority of Americans needed no convincing. After all, a person responsible for killing thousands of people must be evil. We like to believe that which appeals to our moral standards before all else.
But let’s consider an alternate scenario. What if George Bush had gone on television to address the Nation, and had made excuses for the terrorists? Imagine that he had even gone so far as to say that they had done the right thing, and that the world was a better place as a result. The people would have been outraged. Obviously, he would have been immediately ostracized, and would have then been considered among the ‘bad guys’.
The exact same mental process applies to fictional accounts. When we read books, we first believe that which appeals to our moral standards, and allows us to easily categorize the characters into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guy’. So, it seems to me that the puzzle is, in actuality, more of a categorization difficulty. First, we assess the information morally, and then we assimilate the information in our working memory. If the information does not pass the morality filter of the mind, then it is simply is discarded. If it passes, then it’s sorted into either belief or make-belief. So it is irrelevant to consider whether or not a person can be made to temporarily believe in unicorns until one has sorted out the moral polarities. In both the realm of belief and the realm of make-belief, the same rules seem to hold true.
It is also very easy for us to believe – moreover, often we want to believe – many outlandish concepts about the real world around us. We want to believe that Nostradamus predicted the future with 100% accuracy, because it gives us a sense of purpose in life. We want to believe that Moses parted the Red Sea, because it verifies our religious beliefs. Children enjoy beliefs in things such as the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause, because it appeals to their sense of wonder. So again, whether the information is processed under “belief” or “make-belief” has no relevance. What is relevant is that most fiction that manages to transcend the boundaries between belief and make-belief has moral implications – again proving that there is no real puzzle or mystery. Santa Clause gives presents only to the good children. The boogie man terrorizes only the bad children. When Christ comes again, only the good people will be taken to heaven. We believe that which we want to believe, and that which we are comfortable believing.
Let’s also consider disbelief, which also seems to apply moral standards. For instance, many people still refuse to believe in evolution, claiming even that dinosaur bones were put here by God to test our faith, and that the world is really only 10,000 years old. That which compliments our moral and religious beliefs is generally assimilated, whether it is factual or fictional, while that which causes moral dissonance is generally discarded, whether it is factual or fictional.
Self-identity seems to be key in this moral decision making process. Our enjoyment of fiction depends heavily on our ability to retain self-identity while entering into these fantastic worlds. When I read a book, the major determining factor to decide my judgment and enjoyment of the story is its appeal to my own personal ideals. People enjoy fictional getaways only so far as they can put themselves in the shoes of the primary characters. If the author tries to change the reader’s identity by making moral judgments which don’t resonate with those of the reader, then a defense mechanism of total rejection is triggered. To allow an author to change one’s identity is too great a sacrifice. We are willing to allow authors to take us to all corners of their imagined universes, to take us traveling through time, and to take us on extraordinarily perilous adventures – just so long as we can remain ourselves along the way. Sigmund Freud made an important distinction between the ego and the superego which I think is extremely important in solving this puzzle. Raw information is processed and assimilated into schemas in the ego. If one imagines a fictional world set forth by an author, the ego would be the part of the mind at work. Schemas can be altered easily with the addition of new information, just so long as the new information doesn’t threaten or contradict the overall structure of the existing schema. Since the ego has the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, no real-world schema is in danger of being contradicted by the addition of new information into a fictional schema created by an author. The only requirement for that author is that the fiction itself remains consistent. So it is not difficult to understand the ego’s ease in assimilating fictional accounts just as easily as real-world accounts, and even keeping them entirely distinct from one another.
The superego, on the other hand, is another function of personality altogether. It is this part of the mind which makes moral assessments, and though it is easily corruptible, its values seem to be generally unchanging. It may be a product of evolution that prevents us from eating our young, or otherwise acting in ways which might hinder our survival. But the fact is, this superego seems to exist in some form, and does not change very much from the time we are young. Carl Jung objected to the concept of the superego, but his theories in regards to this topic are not at all contradictory. He claimed that moral decision making comes from primal archetypes rather than a superego. But once again, archetypes, though easily corruptible, are very difficult to change, and exist apart from the working memory that processes raw, non-moral information.
Just recently, The New York Times, Associated Press, and Science Now Magazine reported on a Princeton University study, led by Joshua Greene, which indicates that moral judgment may have a more biological cause than people have thought. It began with a question which has been debated for years. If a trolley is hurtling toward five people, and the only way to save those five people is to throw a switch which will divert the trolley onto a spur, where it will kill only one person, would it be right to throw the switch, saving five people at the expense of one? For most people, the answer is yes.
In a similar scenario, the only way to save the five people is to push a large stranger off of a bridge onto the tracks below, where his heavy body will stop the trolley, thereby saving the 5 people, but killing the large man. Again, the person is faced with the same two options in terms of numbers: one option kills five people, the other kills one. However, this time most people say that they would not push the large man from the bridge. When we think about this logically, what’s the difference between throwing a switch and pushing a man off a bridge if the results are exactly the same?
The answer, according to the study, seems to be that the two situations access different areas of the brain. The subjects were asked the preceding two moral dilemmas along with 58 others while being monitored by imaging devices to detect brain activity. The questions were divided evenly into personal moral dilemmas and impersonal moral dilemmas. Personal dilemmas included questions such as: During a war, should one smother a crying baby in order to prevent an entire group of people from being discovered by invaders? Would it be right to throw people off of a sinking lifeboat? Impersonal dilemmas included: Would you ignore appeals for money for starving children even if you were well off? If you find a wallet, would you keep the money? The results of the brain scans were consistent, even when the answers were not. When asked to decide on impersonal dilemmas, areas of the working memory (which is used for cold logic) were activated. When asked for more personal decisions, like throwing the man from the bridge or smothering the baby, areas related to higher emotional processing were activated, while the working memory remained comparatively inactive.
So this brings an entirely biological aspect to our puzzle of imaginative resistance. The working memory is dynamic. It can process and assimilate fictional information just as easily as it can work with real-world information. As long as there is consistency within a plot, our minds can reason that it is possible for monsters to roam the Earth, for haunted houses to come to life, or for dogs to have conversations with their masters. The thing that makes the superego different is that it is at least somewhat hard-coded from the time we are young. It does not change, and when faced with personal moral dilemmas – even fictional ones – emotional rather than logical brain centers are triggered, creating resistance.
Now that the puzzle is sufficiently solved, let’s examine that which interests me most – the implications. If we are to believe that morality is fixed and constant, and that resistance is evoked when fiction seems to take a morally deviant turn, then what does that determine about the true nature of humanity? To put it another way, if the exact same brain centers are activated during real-world reasoning and fictional reasoning, then what do we conclude about those people who, for instance, cheer for the villains in movies?
Perhaps we should face the possibility that we’re not the moral beings we’d like to believe ourselves to be. Or perhaps we maintain morality only until given a tempting enough excuse to accept a case for immorality. If you look at American culture in particular, our entertainment is inundated with moral deviance, even in the actions of our heroes. What does the cheering of an audience imply when it’s directed at Arnold Schwarzenegger slaughtering baddies by the hundreds? What do you think of a person who anxiously anticipates a supernatural serial killer’s next gruesome murder in a horror flick? In many (if not most) heist movies, the bank robbers are portrayed as the protagonists, and we find ourselves feeling relieved when they narrowly escape the police. Furthermore, we even tend to be contradictory in our judgments. For example, almost all Americans claim to believe in a God of some sort, yet a great number of our most popular movies portray a seemingly godless world. Most people believe premarital sex is wrong, yet the pornography market makes billions of dollars every year. So an underlying hypocrisy seems to exist in all of these cases.
I believe this is due to our continual internal struggles between temptation and that which we have taken for morality. When Schwarzenegger is slaughtering bad guys by the hundreds, it gives us a sense of power. It appeals to our primal natures. If we use reason, most of us know that if we were put in Schwarzenegger’s situation, we could not kill people so nonchalantly. But we would never admit that to ourselves – we’re having too much fun watching dead bodies pile up beneath our muscle-bound hero’s feet! So our reaction in this case is to make excuses: “Well, it’s ok that he’s slaughtering people. They’re the bad guys, and they have his daughter.” I believe the most famous self-excuse is, “Well, it’s ok for me to cheer for the serial killing maniac in this horror movie, because I know that it’s only a movie.”
So while imaginative resistance obviously exists, it seems to take only a small excuse for our temptations to dominate our moral judgments. For something hard-coded into the brain, morality is an awfully flimsy trait in humans.
So, this brings us to the most important implications. We’ve determined that moral judgments are made in a different area of the brain than non-moral judgments. We’ve determined that there is essentially no difference between making moral judgments whether it’s in regards to fiction or to the real world. So, if morality is so flimsy when it comes to how we perceive our entertainment, then would logic lead us to believe it is equally flimsy in real-world instances? Wouldn’t we similarly need nothing more than a small excuse or temptation to forgive someone for serial murder, or for massacring people whom we perceive as ‘bad’ – or to even be willing to commit these crimes ourselves?
Well, again, this has been demonstrated through science (as well as history). Based on the events of World War II, a researcher by the name of Stanley Milgram became interested in the psychology behind the Nazi army’s acts of genocide. The troubling thing about the Nazis was that, before Hitler’s regime, these people were not mass murderers. These were regular people, transformed into beasts under Hitler’s authoritarian rule. The questions this raises are important. Could this happen again? Could this happen to us under certain circumstances?
Milgram’s studies have been monumental in the area of social psychology, but are also criticized by many as being demoralizing and unethical. The test was to take 40 participants from diverse backgrounds and to trick them into believing they were giving other participants (who were, in reality, actors) memory tests. The subject would ask the actor a memory question, and if he got it right, the subject would then move on to the next question. If he got it wrong, however, the subject was instructed by the experimenter to give the acting ‘learner’ an electrical shock by flipping one of a series of switches on a panel. The switches ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts. The labels ranged from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock” and “XXX”. With each wrong answer, the subject was instructed to hit the next switch, moving increasingly upward in intensity. Meanwhile, the experimenter (acting as the authority figure) stood behind the subject to ensure he carried out his duties.
Most psychologists hypothesized that the average subject would refuse to continue after a mild to moderate shock was reached. They were bewildered, however, when only 14 of the 40 subjects disobeyed the experimenter by refusing to go all the way to the highest voltage – a voltage which, to their knowledge, could have been lethal to the person being tested. That means that 65% of the subjects were willing to risk killing a man rather than to disobey authority – and this was not even close to the overwhelming authority of Hitler’s regime. This was simply a scientist acting as an authority figure.
Other related experiments have produced very similar results, showing us that, just as in the case of fiction, it merely takes a small excuse in order for us to behave or believe in ways that we would normally shun. We might even act in ways for which we would condemn, punish, or execute others.
Based on my own introspection along with the empirical evidence to support my theories, I have to conclude that our puzzle isn’t really as mystifying as it initially seems. Just as with many other philosophical debates, the problem is in the way the puzzle is presented. Once the necessary corrections are made, the only problems remaining are these disturbing implications of a fundamentally amoral human race.
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