Inside Outside

Back to Frans De Waal, in A Very Bad Wizard.

TS: Can primate research help them take this into account -- help them see that we're not built for caring about people with whom have no connection with [sic] at all?

FDW: Of course, I'm not saying we shouldn't care. I don't think primate research offers that kind of moral guideline. All I'm saying is that it will be a challenge. I think as soon as we lose our wealth, the caring we do have for distant out-groups will disappear. Given that we are wealthy as a nation, in that sense, we ought to care about others. But as soon as there's a crash in our economy, like in the '20s, say, something really serious, will we still care about distant people? Human caring is predicated on affordability. Moral obligations to the out-group are not -- however much philosophers might wish them to be so -- independent of moral obligations to the in-group. ... [78-79].

(Sommers mentions in a footnote that "this interview, of course, took place in early 2007", a year before the big economic crash of 2008.)

I'm not a primatologist, but that's okay because De Waal is stepping outside his field here anyway. It's not obvious to me that "wealth" is necessary to care about "distant out-groups." Generally it seems to be rich, or richer people who are most atomized, individualized, most apt to denounce foreign aid to people who don't respect the USA. (This may even have something to do with why they're rich.) The US spends a relatively small amount of its wealth on foreign aid, and a poor country like Cuba works hard to help other countries, notably by sending doctors and other aid in disasters like the recent earthquake in Haiti. That same earthquake, even in the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, elicited at least a pretense of caring from many Americans. Need I mention that the Great Depression De Waal refers to also led to the New Deal and a good many social programs that helped the American poor? I suppose his premise could be reconciled with reality by someone who knew what they were talking about, perhaps by adjusting the "out-groups" in question, but Sommers and De Waal are busy playing tough-minded realists here. Others might wish to indulge in soft-minded altruism, but they know better, as philosopher and primatologist: we just aren't built that way.

(Have I mentioned before my distaste for this move? Imagine a Stone Age Darwinian, warning his fellows that human beings evolved in warm climates, so it's hopeless to try to move north into the icy climes of Europe -- they'll just have to wait until we know enough about our genetic endowment to change ourselves to survive in such a hostile environment.)

And there's more:

TS: You also say that we have a mental switch that when triggered can turn friend into foe. An attack of some kind can trigger this. You said that our reaction to Iraq is perhaps an example of this kind of primitive impulse that you see even in chimpanzees.

FDW: If you hit yourself with a hammer, you're going to blame someone -- anyone. Frustration leads to angry reaction. This is known as the scapegoat effect, which occurs even in rats. You place two rats on an electric grid and shock them: they will attack each other as if the other is to blame for the pain. In primates, we often see that if there are tensions among higher-ups, they pick on a low-ranking individual to attack it. I felt the same happened in the United States after 9/11. A big and mighty country got attacked on its own soil -- something it's not used to -- and so someone had to be blamed, someone had to be attacked to let off steam. Thie target's actual guilt was a secondary concern. Afghanistan was not big enough for the angry reaction the US wanted to show. What struck me most was the cheerleading in the media. At the moment, everyone is backtracking and questioning the wisdom of the attack, but at the time it happened, all I saw was great enthusiasm. As a result, what is it, five hundred thousand Iraqis are gone? It's a disaster [79].

There might be a tiny bit of reality here, but again, De Waal is babbling. Did the attack on Iraq have to do with "tensions among higher-ups"? It's arguable, since in fact the US leadership had been planning an attack on Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. And at least "half a million Iraqis" were killed by US sanctions during the 1990s, plus random bombings and other US/UK terrorism. None of this had anything to do with 9/11.

Now, I agree, as do many people, that the US reacted to the 9/11 attacks with a blind bloodlust, a desire to kill ragheads, any ragheads. That led to the original US invasion of Afghanistan. "Afghanistan was not big enough for the angry reaction the US wanted to show," De Waal says -- but the US did attack Afghanistan, even though it remains doubtful that Afghanistan was responsible for 9/11. And while there was elite media and government support for Bush's invasion of Iraq, there was also more dissent than one would have expected: many liberals argued that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and capturing Bin Laden, or maybe we should go after North Korea. The scapegoat mechanism was working well on Afghanistan, but Bush had other obsessions. And nothing De Waal says can account for Obama's escalation in Afghanistan, or continued occupation of Iraq. (For that matter, how do other instances of US aggression fit in here? Vietnam? Bosnia? They don't work.) It looks to me as if De Waal has mixed up Afghanistan and Iraq here. Well, he's a primatologist, not an historian or a political scientist, but his attempts to relate his profession to current events falls flat.

Before the Reality Principle

I remarked in an earlier post how some scientists and philosophers (among others) like to fancy themselves tough, unsentimental realists -- they can face the unpleasant reality that free will is an illusion, that Man is a hairless ape, that Man is inherently aggressive, brutal, competitive, hierarchical, and so on. (Freud also opposed the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle -- get it? Reality is the opposite of pleasure. If you feel good right now, you're living in a fool's paradise, but don't worry: Reality is gonna get ya in the end.) Sometimes they affect some regret that reality is so unattractive, but the upshot is still that life sucks and then you die, and thanks to their years of philosophical or scientific training, they can face it. Can you, punk? Huh?

I stopped taking this pose seriously when I encountered it in political reactionaries (proto-Reaganite conservatives) in the 1970s. Life is unfair, they'd opine, and unfortunately governments -- even our America, home of the brave and land of the free -- must do nasty things. I found, however, that like most Americans they were woefully uninformed about how much blood Uncle Sam actually has on his hands, and when I'd spell it out for them, they'd start looking green around the gills.

Aside from the discussions in A Very Bad Wizard I've discussed so far, there's also Frans De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who has challenged the popular quasi-Darwinian program of

providing a sort of shock therapy to people in the social sciences and philosophy. And when the social scientists would reply, "But sometimes people are kind to each other," they would reply, "No, no, that's all made up, they're faking that. There has to be some sort of selfish ulterior motive behind it" [75].

De Waal even recognizes what many people have trouble recognizing: that people (and other primates) are social and selfish, cruel and kind. He talks about empathy and its importance as a source for morality. But then he makes what I think is a basic error of his own:

Because the way evolution works, yes -- it's a nasty process. Evolution works by eliminating those who are not successful. Natural selection is a process that cares only about your own reproduction, or gene selection, and everything else is irrelevant [73-74].

From a certain point of view, De Waal is correct; but that point of view is a creationist perspective, which sees the world as the product of a personal intelligence. He's anthropomorphizing natural selection here. But evolution is not Natural Selection Idol. Natural selection doesn't sit around wherever natural selection sits, like a cosmic Simon Cowell, gleefully and sadistically eliminating the Losers while the studio audience howls like the Bandur-log. Natural selection doesn't "care" about your own reproduction, or about anything else: it's an impersonal, nonpersonal process. "The struggle for existence" is at best a technical term in Darwin's theory, which should be replaced because people, including scientists, tend to take it literally. Direct competition is not the norm in natural selection -- plants, for example, do not try to bite out each other's throats. Predators and prey are not in competition with each other.

Not only that: everybody dies, the "successful" along with the "unfit." The successful may live longer, or have more offspring, but they all die in the end, and most species eventually go extinct after a longer or shorter run. (And in the longest run, the sun goes nova and the universe collapses into heat death and the extinction of everything.) The unfit don't even know that they have been eliminated; a species is not a Platonic form with consciousness that wails disconsolately (or who knows, puts a brave face on it, whatever) as it is sent to the showers.

Some people find this appalling, or least insufficiently dramatic. They want a cosmic Someone -- a cosmic Simon Cowell, in fact -- who sits and watches, and commiserates and This Hurts Him More Than It Hurts You, and they find such a notion comforting. But if Super-Simon is out there somewhere, he's the one who is cruel. Whether you believe in Theistic Evolution, Intelligent Design, or Young-Earth Creationism, you believe that all the millennia or eons of Nature Red in Tooth and Claw is Super-Simon's deliberate, conscious plan. He wants it that way.

This first occurred to me when I read an essay by Stephen Jay Gould on the Ichneumonidae, a superfamily of wasps, most of which insert their eggs into caterpillars. The larvae then feed on the hosts' innards until they're mature, and eat their way out. Someone wrote to Darwin, as I recall, complaining how awful it was that Natural Selection should produce such awful creatures. Darwin, though, saw it (via) as I do:

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

The Ichneumonidae are there, however they came into being. Not that the Ichneumonidae are cruel; the larvae don't know that they're eating their host alive. Nor is Natural Selection cruel; even "indifferent" anthropomorphizes it too much. The Ichneumonidae are another example of species finding an ecological niche. (Are they really that much more horrible than carnivorous animals that have to kill other animals to live?) But if a personal Creator made the Ichneumonidae, or earthquakes, or tsunamis, or leukemia, it knew what it was doing. Creation is a lifestyle choice.