Epistemic or Moral Communities

"Epistemic" is a word I first heard at this conference.  It was used frequently, and sometimes unclearly, and after extensive research found that it relates to knowledge, understanding.  This makes little sense as an adjective for "theory" as all theories are about knowledge.   This explains my personal motivation for reviewing this conference, and its attempt to address Political Civility.  I will attempt to illustrate that this department, and from this sample of distinguished academics in this field, is closer to being something other than their self defined, "epistemic community" but rather a different kind of community that is inherently inimical to the discovery and expansion of knowledge.

This is quoted from this essay by Jonathan Haidt in Science. The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology
A moral community has a set of shared norms about how members ought to behave, combined with means for imposing costs on violators and/or channeling benefits to cooperators. A big step in modeling the evolution of such communities is the extension of reciprocal altruism by “indirect reciprocity” (31) in which virtue pays by improving one's reputation, which elicits later cooperation from others. Reputation is a powerful force for strengthening and enlarging moral communities.

There is no better example of this than an academic discipline or department.  While it does not describe "how members ought to behave" it does prescribe the contours, the limits of the values that can be shared among members.  Haidt goes on to explore other types of communities, in this case religious.

Whatever the origins of religiosity, nearly all religions have culturally evolved complexes of practices, stories, and norms that work together to suppress the self and connect people to something beyond the self. Newberg (37) found that religious experiences often involve decreased activity in brain areas that maintain maps of the self's boundaries and position, consistent with widespread reports that mystical experiences involve feelings of merging with God or the universe. Studies of ritual, particularly those involving the sort of synchronized motor movements common in religious rites, indicate that such rituals serve to bind participants together in what is often reported to be an ecstatic state of union (38). Recent work on mirror neurons indicates that, whereas such neurons exist in other primates, they are much more numerous in human beings, and they serve to synchronize our feelings and movements with those of others around us (39). Whether people use their mirror neurons to feel another's pain, enjoy a synchronized dance, or bow in unison toward Mecca, it is clear that we are prepared, neurologically, psychologically, and culturally, to link our consciousness, our emotions, and our motor movements with those of other people.

Patriotism could be substituted for religion in the act of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  I have studied the jurisprudence of this ritual beginning in 1941 up to the present day's pending appeals.  " Studies of ritual, particularly those involving the sort of synchronized motor movements common in religious rites, indicate that such rituals serve to bind participants together in what is often reported to be an ecstatic state of union" Such an example of synchronized motor movements is placing the hand to the heart when this is recited.  The concatenation of sounds are meaningless, not only to the five year olds who first repeat the words, but were to the Georgia State legislators, who recently passed a bill threating secession hours after affirming their pledge to "one nation indivisible."

Haidt is right in that the power of emotion, especially when potentiated by group fervor.  This has another effect, one that turns the ecstatic state of union into an equally powerful hatred of he who fails to join in the ritual.  It is an ugly dynamic to see in a lynch mob, or an old film of the Nuremberg volksprecht or to this eye, the mass recitation of this patriotic ritual in the halls of congress.  And when I see a hint of it, albeit for noble causes, in a house of erudition, a sacred hall of unfettered knowledge, where only discovered truth is exalted, it is an atheistic sacrilege that I must resist.

The goal of my effort, perhaps to resonate with a few, is not joy, or even serenity, but quite the opposite, the engagement of diverse ideas, the sharing of experience and insights that has the capacity to transform individuals and societies.