David Brook’s article in the NYT of April 9 is worth reading. He couches it in the shift from moral philosophy to ethics, as informed by cognitive science. The subject is the simultaneous actions of perception and apperception: the instantaneous linkage of sense data and implicit judgment. For fun, he might have added that implicit judgment is already selecting the data we observe, even before we know it: if it were not, how would those awesome light bulb illuminating “ah hah” moments of recognition occur?

Brooks’ healthy food for thought, though, is around the bases of our implicit judgments: how they result from group social norms. He moves a bit far a field, for me, here: gliding effortlessly into the guidance of moral judgment through evolution of successful group cooperation (as opposed simply to evolutionary competition: see Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid for a more extensive romp through this particular field than the Op-Ed page provides….)

But Brooks might look closer than evolution: to the social psychology of groups, for example. How judgments, both for good and ill, begin with individuals’ identifications, derived from familial and cultural surrounds, beginning at an early age; and gradually evolve through use into internalization. From internalization, its back out to perception: and how we see the world we simultaneously interpret.

Or to symbolic associations themselves: how we read experience into what we see. Today, which is Easter Sunday, I passed a poster, written in Gaelic, attached to a lamp-post in Dun Laoghaire Ireland.

At its center was a white lily—the lily of course, commonly associated with Easter and the newness of Spring: resurrection.
Ahh, but take a cultural step back: Easter, too, in Ireland, is connected with the Rising, and the events of Easter Monday, 1916: so from my culturally distant eye, a flower—whose symbolic import I thought to be devoutly Christian, was off the mark. OK, to be fair, half-way there: but via the linkage of Christian Holiday and the origins of Irish National Liberation. This is the stuff of our cultural embeddedness in groups: how we come to see and understand.

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