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No source entered for Contribution #3572Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.
At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?
In a series of recent articles and a book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.
Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people's reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding (when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.)
Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system --he calls it moral judgment -- came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.
The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously --they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition.
Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt's view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.
So why has evolution equipped the brain with two moral systems when just one might seem plenty?
"We have a complex animal mind that only recently evolved language and language-based reasoning," Dr. Haidt said. "No way was control of the organism going to be handed over to this novel faculty."
He likens the mind¹s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant's back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant.
Dr. Haidt developed a better sense of the elephant after visiting India at the suggestion of an anthropologist, Richard Shweder. In Bhubaneswar, in the Indian state of Orissa, Dr. Haidt saw that people recognized a much wider moral domain than the issues of harm and justice that are central to Western morality. Indians were concerned with integrating the community through rituals and committed to concepts of religious purity as a way to restrain behavior.
On his return from India, Dr. Haidt combed the literature of anthropology and psychology for ideas about morality throughout the world. He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together.
Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.
The five moral systems, in Dr. Haidt's view, are innate psychological mechanisms that predispose children to absorb certain virtues. Because these virtues are learned, morality may vary widely from culture to culture, while maintaining its central role of restraining selfishness. In Western societies, the focus is on protecting individuals by insisting that everyone be treated fairly. Creativity is high, but society is less orderly. In many other societies, selfishness is suppressed "through practices, rituals and stories that help a person play a cooperative role in a larger social entity,"Dr. Haidt said.
He is aware that many people --including "the politically homogeneous discipline of psychology" -- equate morality with justice, rights and the welfare of the individual, and dismiss everything else as mere social convention. But many societies around the world do in fact behave as if loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity are moral concepts, Dr. Haidt notes, and this justifies taking a wider view of the moral domain.
The idea that morality and sacredness are intertwined, he said, may now be out of fashion but has a venerable pedigree, tracing back to Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology.
Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. "If we didn't have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness," he said. "We'd still be just small bands roving around."
Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. "Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful,"he said.
Dr. Haidt came to recognize the importance of religion by a roundabout route. "I first found divinity in disgust," he writes in his book The Happiness Hypothesis.
The emotion of disgust probably evolved when people became meat eaters and had to learn which foods might be contaminated with bacteria, a problem not presented by plant foods. Disgust was then extended to many other categories, he argues, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals.
"Imagine visiting a town," Dr. Haidt writes, "where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex 'doggie style' in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass."
He sees the disgust evoked by such a scene as allied to notions of physical and religious purity. Purity is, in his view, a moral system that promotes the goals of controlling selfish desires and acting in a religiously approved way.
Notions of disgust and purity are widespread outside Western cultures. "Educated liberals are the only group to say, 'I find that disgusting but that doesn't make it wrong,'" Dr. Haidt said.
Working with a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt has detected a striking political dimension to morality. He and Mr. Graham asked people to identify their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum and then complete a questionnaire that assessed the importance attached to each of the five moral systems. (The test, called the moral foundations questionnaire, can be taken online, at www.YourMorals.org.)
They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals --those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity.
Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals.
Dr. Haidt believes that many political disagreements between liberals and conservatives may reflect the different emphasis each places on the five moral categories.
Take attitudes to contemporary art and music. Conservatives fear that subversive art will undermine authority, violate the in-group's traditions and offend canons of purity and sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, see contemporary art as protecting equality by assailing the establishment, especially if the art is by oppressed groups.
Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.
Dr. Haidt, who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. "A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital," he said. "I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco --most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement."
Other psychologists have mixed views about Dr. Haidt's ideas.
Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, said, "I'm a big fan of Haidt's work." He added that the idea of including purity in the moral domain could make psychological sense even if purity had no place in moral reasoning.
But Frans B. M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said he disagreed with Dr. Haidt's view that the task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Many animals show empathy and altruistic tendencies but do not have moral systems.
"For me, the moral system is one that resolves the tension between individual and group interests in a way that seems best for the most members of the group, hence promotes a give and take,"Dr. de Waal said.
He said that he also disagreed with Dr. Haidt¹s alignment of liberals with individual rights and conservatives with social cohesiveness.
"It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good --safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor -- that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives," Dr. de Waal said.
That alignment also bothers John T. Jost, a political psychologist at New York University. Dr. Jost said he admired Dr. Haidt as a "very interesting and creative social psychologist" and found his work useful in drawing attention to the strong moral element in political beliefs.
But the fact that liberals and conservatives agree on the first two of Dr. Haidt's principles --do no harm and do unto others as you would have them do unto you ‹ means that those are good candidates to be moral virtues. The fact that liberals and conservatives disagree on the other three principles "suggests to me that they are not general moral virtues but specific ideological commitments or values," Dr. Jost said.
In defense of his views, Dr. Haidt said that moral claims could be valid even if not universally acknowledged.
"It is at least possible," he said, "that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand."
Is "Do Unto Others" Written Into Our Genes?
Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.
At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?
In a series of recent articles and a book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.
Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people's reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding (when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.)
Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system --he calls it moral judgment -- came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.
The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously --they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition.
Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt's view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.
So why has evolution equipped the brain with two moral systems when just one might seem plenty?
"We have a complex animal mind that only recently evolved language and language-based reasoning," Dr. Haidt said. "No way was control of the organism going to be handed over to this novel faculty."
He likens the mind¹s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant's back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant.
Dr. Haidt developed a better sense of the elephant after visiting India at the suggestion of an anthropologist, Richard Shweder. In Bhubaneswar, in the Indian state of Orissa, Dr. Haidt saw that people recognized a much wider moral domain than the issues of harm and justice that are central to Western morality. Indians were concerned with integrating the community through rituals and committed to concepts of religious purity as a way to restrain behavior.
On his return from India, Dr. Haidt combed the literature of anthropology and psychology for ideas about morality throughout the world. He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together.
Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.
The five moral systems, in Dr. Haidt's view, are innate psychological mechanisms that predispose children to absorb certain virtues. Because these virtues are learned, morality may vary widely from culture to culture, while maintaining its central role of restraining selfishness. In Western societies, the focus is on protecting individuals by insisting that everyone be treated fairly. Creativity is high, but society is less orderly. In many other societies, selfishness is suppressed "through practices, rituals and stories that help a person play a cooperative role in a larger social entity,"Dr. Haidt said.
He is aware that many people --including "the politically homogeneous discipline of psychology" -- equate morality with justice, rights and the welfare of the individual, and dismiss everything else as mere social convention. But many societies around the world do in fact behave as if loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity are moral concepts, Dr. Haidt notes, and this justifies taking a wider view of the moral domain.
The idea that morality and sacredness are intertwined, he said, may now be out of fashion but has a venerable pedigree, tracing back to Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology.
Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. "If we didn't have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness," he said. "We'd still be just small bands roving around."
Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. "Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful,"he said.
Dr. Haidt came to recognize the importance of religion by a roundabout route. "I first found divinity in disgust," he writes in his book The Happiness Hypothesis.
The emotion of disgust probably evolved when people became meat eaters and had to learn which foods might be contaminated with bacteria, a problem not presented by plant foods. Disgust was then extended to many other categories, he argues, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals.
"Imagine visiting a town," Dr. Haidt writes, "where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex 'doggie style' in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass."
He sees the disgust evoked by such a scene as allied to notions of physical and religious purity. Purity is, in his view, a moral system that promotes the goals of controlling selfish desires and acting in a religiously approved way.
Notions of disgust and purity are widespread outside Western cultures. "Educated liberals are the only group to say, 'I find that disgusting but that doesn't make it wrong,'" Dr. Haidt said.
Working with a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt has detected a striking political dimension to morality. He and Mr. Graham asked people to identify their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum and then complete a questionnaire that assessed the importance attached to each of the five moral systems. (The test, called the moral foundations questionnaire, can be taken online, at www.YourMorals.org.)
They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals --those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity.
Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals.
Dr. Haidt believes that many political disagreements between liberals and conservatives may reflect the different emphasis each places on the five moral categories.
Take attitudes to contemporary art and music. Conservatives fear that subversive art will undermine authority, violate the in-group's traditions and offend canons of purity and sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, see contemporary art as protecting equality by assailing the establishment, especially if the art is by oppressed groups.
Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.
Dr. Haidt, who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. "A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital," he said. "I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco --most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement."
Other psychologists have mixed views about Dr. Haidt's ideas.
Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, said, "I'm a big fan of Haidt's work." He added that the idea of including purity in the moral domain could make psychological sense even if purity had no place in moral reasoning.
But Frans B. M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said he disagreed with Dr. Haidt's view that the task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Many animals show empathy and altruistic tendencies but do not have moral systems.
"For me, the moral system is one that resolves the tension between individual and group interests in a way that seems best for the most members of the group, hence promotes a give and take,"Dr. de Waal said.
He said that he also disagreed with Dr. Haidt¹s alignment of liberals with individual rights and conservatives with social cohesiveness.
"It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good --safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor -- that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives," Dr. de Waal said.
That alignment also bothers John T. Jost, a political psychologist at New York University. Dr. Jost said he admired Dr. Haidt as a "very interesting and creative social psychologist" and found his work useful in drawing attention to the strong moral element in political beliefs.
But the fact that liberals and conservatives agree on the first two of Dr. Haidt's principles --do no harm and do unto others as you would have them do unto you ‹ means that those are good candidates to be moral virtues. The fact that liberals and conservatives disagree on the other three principles "suggests to me that they are not general moral virtues but specific ideological commitments or values," Dr. Jost said.
In defense of his views, Dr. Haidt said that moral claims could be valid even if not universally acknowledged.
"It is at least possible," he said, "that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand."
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Source type: PeriodicalNew York Times http://
Here is the fact we must all realize:
We really are all nothing more than a bunch of hairless primates turned loose on this planet. And you yourself are nothing more than a single hairless primate on a planet full of them. Deal with it! Get over yourself!
When I was forced to accept this conclusion based on the overwhelming evidence, I had to find some way to come to terms with it, rather than make something else up just to make myself feel better. I tried imagining that God had somehow given us some spark of a soul that set us apart from the animals, but the evidence kept coming at me. There is no substantial difference between human brain function and that of the higher mammals. Sure, we have language and complex thought, but they are just different manifestations of the same basic brain chemistry.
The Earth is not at the center of the universe, and humans are not the central point of creation, no matter what any holy book says. We need to get over our egocentric view of the universe. We are not that special, and no deity out there seems to care a lick for us. We seem to be on our own.
I'm not going to try to convince you of this. The evidence is there for you to look at.
But I will give you one piece of anecdotal evidence. Just look at the evening news. What makes more sense, that the world is fallen into sin because a man and woman ate some magic fruit off a forbidden tree, or that our cities are full of hairless primates that are behaving exactly as you would expect them to?
Well now for my point. How do we deal with this realization? How do we incorporate it in with our day to day lives? How do we continue to love, create beauty, and enjoy life? How do we deal with other groups of hairless primates that believe differently from us? Just because our religious background does not have a way to deal with these facts does not mean we can't work to figure it out.
Some religious folks say the idea of evolution brings out our worst behavior, but I'd like to show how being honest about this reality can bring out all sorts of virtues instead.
First off, this realization should give us clues into our own mind and behavior. I can study how the human brain works and understand its weaknesses and failing points. And then I can realize that I too own one of these imperfect primate brains. This allows me to be honest with myself, to question how I see the world, and to realize how my view of reality is shaped by the limitations of our shared evolution. It allows us to realize that we can be wrong about things, and it allows us to change.
This is called humility.
Next, Fundamental Christianity tells us we are a sinful mess that needs redemption, but by realizing our humble nature we can cut ourselves some slack. Religion teaches us to expect too much from ourselves, and then beats us up for not measuring up, or tells us we need salvation from some imaginary being. But when we think about the fact that we have a limited, semi-evolved brain, and that we live in a very complex world, we can expect nothing more than imperfection. When we screw up, which we all do, we can just deal with the consequences of our actions, hopefully learn from them, and then move on. No self-flagellation necessary. We don't need to beat ourselves up for simply being who we are.
This is called self respect.
I can also watch the strange behavior of those around me and realize that I can't expect too much from my fellow primates. When some guy cuts me off in traffic and then flips me the bird just for good measure, I can think of his limited brain and wonder about the stresses he is under, and then just shake my head and realize he is not much different from me as I give him the finger in response. We are just a couple of gesturing primates in a struggle for existence, or in this case, a spot on the freeway.
In the same way I can talk to a religious friend and understand his fears and questions about the mystery in this life that leads him to believe a lot of stuff without evidence. I can cut him some slack, knowing that his limited primate brain can only handle so much.
This is called understanding. A Christian would call it grace, and I would agree with them.
Finally, we can realize that we are all in this together. We can realize that the evolution of our brain at one point needed the tribal "me vs. you" mentality to survive, but now we must move beyond that. Our technology has advanced too far for us to continue to behave as we have for the last 40,000 years and beyond. We can realize why people behave as they do, and deal with it appropriately. We can realize the desire for survival, and the love all people feel for their families that was burnt into our DNA over thousands of generations. By doing so we can get a sense of our shared humanity, and why we are the way we are.
Religion tends to divide and put people into separate groups that each think they are specially called by god. It makes people think they are more important than they really are, and takes away from facing the reality of this life. And worse, it keeps people thinking with the "us vs. them" mindset.
Realization of our shared evolution and our common heritage allows us to figure out ways to work together to share this planet and make this life we have better for everything on it. Facing this reality head on allows us to better create our own set of shared ethics. This is called operating from a viewpoint of long-term mutual-interest, and it is a much better philosophy to live by than some strange moral code written up thousands of years ago by goat herders in the desert.
I realize I got a little preachy at the end there. Please forgive me. I'm just another hairless primate.
Please forgive me. I'm just another hairless primate.
Here is the fact we must all realize:
We really are all nothing more than a bunch of hairless primates turned loose on this planet. And you yourself are nothing more than a single hairless primate on a planet full of them. Deal with it! Get over yourself!
When I was forced to accept this conclusion based on the overwhelming evidence, I had to find some way to come to terms with it, rather than make something else up just to make myself feel better. I tried imagining that God had somehow given us some spark of a soul that set us apart from the animals, but the evidence kept coming at me. There is no substantial difference between human brain function and that of the higher mammals. Sure, we have language and complex thought, but they are just different manifestations of the same basic brain chemistry.
The Earth is not at the center of the universe, and humans are not the central point of creation, no matter what any holy book says. We need to get over our egocentric view of the universe. We are not that special, and no deity out there seems to care a lick for us. We seem to be on our own.
I'm not going to try to convince you of this. The evidence is there for you to look at.
But I will give you one piece of anecdotal evidence. Just look at the evening news. What makes more sense, that the world is fallen into sin because a man and woman ate some magic fruit off a forbidden tree, or that our cities are full of hairless primates that are behaving exactly as you would expect them to?
Well now for my point. How do we deal with this realization? How do we incorporate it in with our day to day lives? How do we continue to love, create beauty, and enjoy life? How do we deal with other groups of hairless primates that believe differently from us? Just because our religious background does not have a way to deal with these facts does not mean we can't work to figure it out.
Some religious folks say the idea of evolution brings out our worst behavior, but I'd like to show how being honest about this reality can bring out all sorts of virtues instead.
First off, this realization should give us clues into our own mind and behavior. I can study how the human brain works and understand its weaknesses and failing points. And then I can realize that I too own one of these imperfect primate brains. This allows me to be honest with myself, to question how I see the world, and to realize how my view of reality is shaped by the limitations of our shared evolution. It allows us to realize that we can be wrong about things, and it allows us to change.
This is called humility.
Next, Fundamental Christianity tells us we are a sinful mess that needs redemption, but by realizing our humble nature we can cut ourselves some slack. Religion teaches us to expect too much from ourselves, and then beats us up for not measuring up, or tells us we need salvation from some imaginary being. But when we think about the fact that we have a limited, semi-evolved brain, and that we live in a very complex world, we can expect nothing more than imperfection. When we screw up, which we all do, we can just deal with the consequences of our actions, hopefully learn from them, and then move on. No self-flagellation necessary. We don't need to beat ourselves up for simply being who we are.
This is called self respect.
I can also watch the strange behavior of those around me and realize that I can't expect too much from my fellow primates. When some guy cuts me off in traffic and then flips me the bird just for good measure, I can think of his limited brain and wonder about the stresses he is under, and then just shake my head and realize he is not much different from me as I give him the finger in response. We are just a couple of gesturing primates in a struggle for existence, or in this case, a spot on the freeway.
In the same way I can talk to a religious friend and understand his fears and questions about the mystery in this life that leads him to believe a lot of stuff without evidence. I can cut him some slack, knowing that his limited primate brain can only handle so much.
This is called understanding. A Christian would call it grace, and I would agree with them.
Finally, we can realize that we are all in this together. We can realize that the evolution of our brain at one point needed the tribal "me vs. you" mentality to survive, but now we must move beyond that. Our technology has advanced too far for us to continue to behave as we have for the last 40,000 years and beyond. We can realize why people behave as they do, and deal with it appropriately. We can realize the desire for survival, and the love all people feel for their families that was burnt into our DNA over thousands of generations. By doing so we can get a sense of our shared humanity, and why we are the way we are.
Religion tends to divide and put people into separate groups that each think they are specially called by god. It makes people think they are more important than they really are, and takes away from facing the reality of this life. And worse, it keeps people thinking with the "us vs. them" mindset.
Realization of our shared evolution and our common heritage allows us to figure out ways to work together to share this planet and make this life we have better for everything on it. Facing this reality head on allows us to better create our own set of shared ethics. This is called operating from a viewpoint of long-term mutual-interest, and it is a much better philosophy to live by than some strange moral code written up thousands of years ago by goat herders in the desert.
I realize I got a little preachy at the end there. Please forgive me. I'm just another hairless primate.