Generally speaking, the intellect’s job in all this is to interpret, rather than develop or question, the values and strategies of the group. In many cases the intellect is essentially along for the ride. The real motivational work, both of convincing and of motivating action and loyalty, has already been done. The intellect helped sort and pick out the markers. But once the group or exemplar has been identified, the job of the intellect is largely interpretation. Apply the group value and strategy to this or that situation. Explain this or that in terms of the group narrative. The actual motivational, human force of the intellect is fairly weak. But it is the lens through which the content of the world is interpreted to apply onto the landscape of the internal instinctive value structure narrative, and it is the lens by which the energy of the value instincts are focused into action upon the world.

I recall with some clarity the sudden realization that the means by which someone I knew very well and had known for years came to their moral opinions was radically different from my own. I tend to be someone whose instinct is to disagree with everyone and everything. Partly I may just be a disagreeable person. But I think to some degree it’s because of the odd and infuriating way I tend to take anything anybody says, not merely as a statement, but as an expression of theory. Everything everyone says seems like a hypothesis about the world, a statement that must be tested both for its own validity and usefulness, as well as its ability to be integrated with a larger coherent system of theories about the world. How much sense does it make it say that, on its own, and how much sense does it make as part of a larger interconnected theory about the world? This isn’t generally how most people think when they speak. The first question most people ask themselves after saying something isn’t “”Can this behavior be universalized, does it fall foul of the categorical imperative?” but “Does this capture how I feel or accomplish my goals for my communication and actions?” If our speech and actions are anything, they are motivated.

Now, I don’t want to run down the rabbit hole of post-modernism and argue that all speech is (merely) political, that all thought and action are ploys in service of power, that power is the only game in town. There are many complex motivations that our words and actions can be expressions of, and power is only one of them. But the post-modernists aren’t on to nothing. Their ideas are compelling because they find something true about humanity and twist it and elevate it to become everything about humanity. Simply because speech and action are fundamentally motivated doesn’t mean that motivation isn’t itself complex, or that there aren’t other factors in play that check, correct, encourage, counterbalance, and even override one or many of those motivations.

How much of the content of our religion, our science, our philosophy, even our parenting, are focused on checking and correcting and pointing out our human motivations and weaknesses? I think the answer would have to be, most of them. We’ve developed enormous systems to help us deal with this exact problem we face. Those systems are, themselves, human systems, and so are not in some miraculous way perfect and inhuman. They are human endeavors and so must always be concerned with human values. Their goal is simply to find a way to do the work better, more accurately, more effectively. One easy way to test a theory is simply to have a person or a whole people group live it out, so it can be tested in practice across the breadth of a life, many lives, and a variety of circumstances. But this is a very costly strategy. And as someone once said, we engage in the free exchange and competition of ideas so our ideas can die instead of us.