You've Got to Be Sloppily Taught

It's not enough to reject biological reductionism: you must also offer a better alternative to it.  Mary Midgley is properly critical of "blank slate" (or, as she calls them, "blank paper") conceptions of human nature.  I began to wonder, though, how many people actually, consistently believe that human beings are blank slates.  I've noticed that many who are accused of that belief don't actually hold it; often they are professionals in biology and related fields, like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard C. Lewontin, Hilary Rose, and Anne Fausto-Sterling.  It's a typical reaction to criticism of a belief to accuse the critic of holding an absolutely opposed stance: if you criticize a given case of biological reductionism, you will be accused of believing that biology is totally irrelevant, just as someone who criticizes a given US policy will be accused of hating America and wanting to see it destroyed, or a woman who criticizes a man's behavior will be accused of hating men and wanting them all castrated.

Case in point: I just read Paul Shankman's The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy (Wisconsin, 2009), an account of Derek Freeman's trashing of Margaret Mead at the end of the twentieth century.  Among much else, Freeman accused Mead and her teacher Franz Boas of believing that human beings were blank slates and that biology played no role in numan nature or culture.  Numerous evolutionary psychology types, including Steven Pinker, David Buss, and Matt Ridley, were happy to parrot Freeman's claim without bothering to determine how accurate it was.  Shankman shows that this accusation was utterly false.  Ironically, Freeman himself rejected sociobiology (though not, it seems, evolutionary psychology) and adhered to an approach he called interactionist; but he could have been accused of rejecting biology for blank-slate cultural determinism if anyone had cared to misrepresent him by dishonest selective quotation.

Shankman quotes Ridley as noting that "For fifty years Mead's Samoans stood as definite proof of the perfectibility of man" and that Boas, Ruth Benedict and Mead had argued that "human nature must be infinitely malleable by culture because (they thought, wrongly) the alternative is fatalism, which is unacceptable" (Shankman, 207-8).  These are also common accusations, but there's no reason why a real blank slate position should imply "the perfectibility of man," and Mead seems not to have believed in such perfectibility: arguing that some cultures are better than others suggests improvement at most.  And ironically, nowadays it's biological determinists and Artificial Intelligence propagandists who talk as though they believe and hope that "man" is perfectible and "infinitely malleable" by genetic manipulation and by turning us into cyborgs.

Midgley does discuss a couple of positions that might plausibly be called "blank slate," such as Skinnerian behaviorism and Sartrean existentialism.  Certainly both approaches seem to encourage people to make extreme and not very well thought-through statements about human nature.  It's not clear to me that Skinner, as wrong as he was, actually thought human beings are blank slates.  Often people will make such extreme statements but if they're challenged, they'll backtrack quickly and qualify them.  I haven't read enough Sartre to be sure about him, but even leaving aside the many changes in his philosophy and politics during his career, I suspect that his reduction of human nature to pure will was a rhetorical move he wouldn't have cared to defend very far.

I've found this to be true of laypeople, who are perfectly capable of saying that human beings are effectively blank slates. and then almost immediately make equally wild, concrete, and unfounded generations about our real human nature.  They may not root that real nature in biology -- often they think it consists of "spirit," "soul," or some other non-material essence -- but they are sure it's real.  So, for example, I've become very tired of the "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" meme, such as this one:

Someday I must make a meme in which a baby reminds us that it knows nothing of language, clothing, taking out the trash, or bowel control.  But when people say things like this -- there's a DJ on the community radio station who regularly plays "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" and similar, less well-known songs -- I want to ask them where they think hatred, intolerance, racism, etc. come from if they must be "taught" to us.  Who invented them, and first taught them?  Someone bad, I betcha.  Maybe it was "religion," conceived as an independently existing autonomous malevolent being rather than a human invention. Someone who sees other people as Them, no doubt -- but that certainly includes many people who believe that Someone Bad taught innocent little babies to be intolerant.  A photo circulated recently on Facebook of a very young bobcat and a very young deer cuddled together, with the caption "Why can't we humans do this?"  Well, first, of course, we humans can, and we do.  We are not always at each other's throats, and a meme like this does nothing to explain why we sometimes engage in violent conflict.  But second, do the people who made, shared, and like this image believe seriously that bobcats and other predators kill for their food because some bad person "carefully taught them"?  This isn't a blank-slate position, it's thoughtlessness.

Midgley talks about the human "heart" and the "soul," which doesn't really get her very far.  Both of these are metaphors, and extremely vague ones at that.  If "heart" means something like core or center, fine, but in fact neither our blood-pumping hearts nor our chest cavities more generally are organs of moral reflection and judgment.  As for the "soul," it's even vaguer.  People talk about it in various ways, sometimes equating it with "spirit" and sometimes distinguishing the two; since neither term refers to any entity in the real world, it doesn't matter where you draw the line, but it doesn't settle anything either.

At one point Midgley declares: "For Christianity, the true self is indeed the soul, but the body is a necessary and suitable expression for it; the resurrection of the body will ensure that whole people, not just ghosts, inhabit Heaven" (10).  As usual, when Midgley talks about religion she gets it wrong.  Christianity has never quite sorted out the nature of the "true self."  The Bible is no help, and later theologians have had to fall back on Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy.  The apostle Paul, whose discussion of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 is often referred to, distinguished between the body and flesh, declaring ex cathedra that in the resurrection of the body, the flesh will be replaced with a body of spirit.  The gospels present Jesus' resurrection as a body of flesh, so most people who quote Paul equate the body and the flesh.  If the new body will be "spirit," what is the difference between that and the soul?  "Ghost" comes from the old German for "spirit," so that's no help to Midgley either.

She even falls back on "common sense," which she defines as "not some special naïve set of beliefs, but any sort of practical assumption compatible with the business of everyday living" (38).  The trouble with this is that any number of irrational and harmful assumptions are "practical" and "compatible with the business of everyday living."

The notion of human nature is wide and indispensable to political thought.  Thinkers of all colours have always used it, and it is still presupposed by those who officially deny it.  (For instance, those who deny that man is naturally aggressive on the ground that he is naturally friendly are not dispensing with the notion of human nature.)  The real disputes are about what human nature is like [39].

The trouble is that "human nature," like "common sense," is always used from the wrong end: rather than point to evidence of "what human nature is like", people tend to rationalize their prejudices and wishes as "common sense" and "human nature."  In an important sense, they're right.  A popular slogan from the 60s and 70s claimed that the only unnatural sexual act is one you can't perform -- that is, because it's physically impossible.  Anything that human beings do is "natural" -- if it weren't, we couldn't do it.  This applies to traits and behavior we don't like as well as to those we do.  If "thinkers of all colors have always used" the concept of human nature, that suggests to me that it doesn't have much content: it's what I call a totem-word, invoked to shut off debate and to obscure the issues rather than introduce any real information into the discussion.

There's a curious divide in the way people use words like "nature" and "natural."  People "oscillate," to use Midgley's word, between descriptive and prescriptive means of important abstractions.  "Normal," for instance, can describe what most people do -- or it can prescribe what people should do, though the thought process  (such as it is) is circular: we should do this because it's what most people do, but if most people don't do it, they should.  Other such words are "culture" (used descriptively for the constellation of practices and norms and so on typical of a group of people, and prescriptively for good practices and norms which demonstrate that you're a "cultured" person.), "art," and "nature."  ("Nature" especially exhibits this oscillation in Christian use, where "nature" is both the voice of God and the voice of sin.  In Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death [Routledge, 1992], Evelyn Fox Keller shows how and why this oscillation came about.)  Just because something is natural doesn't mean it's good, as the most dogmatic champion of human nature will concede; but he or she will flipflop to the normative sense of "nature" when it's expedient.

Another important concept that gets used in such conflicting ways is "evolution."  People commonly use it as a moralizing term: an "evolved" person is mature, wise, learned, an "unevolved" person is not.  But any trait that human beings exhibit has survived the trial-by-ordeal of Darwinian natural selection.  Midgley herself falls into this error when she says that "In going up the evolutionary scale, we find a quite steady increase in the openness of programs" (154); but there is no evolutionary scale to go up and down.  She's referring to the pre-Darwinian, and actually anti-Darwinian Great Chain of Being, which ranks organisms from less "complex" to more "complex" -- the latter of course assumed to be better.  And every organism, human beings not excluded, embodies old and new, "primitive" and "advanced," traits.

So it seems to me that "human nature" is a vacuous, circular term that is not of any help in the discussion of moral issues or any other.  You can debate whether a given trait is innate or not, but particularly in human behavior, it's hard to settle the question.  As Midgley also says,

Right from birth, people are individuals; each person is different in kind. I think this is in part what makes the concentration on IQ seem so unsuitable and offensive.  What happens in heredity certainly is not that we are born with a definite quantity of a standard stuff called intelligence, or even cleverness, entitling us to a particular place in the social hierarchy, a pre-programmed degree in some monstrous cosmic examination.  Instead, we each have our own peculiarly formed set of capacities and incapacities, our own personal repertoire [40-41].

If it were true that "each person is different in kind", then each individual would have his or her own nature (which is what "kind" means in this context) and it would be meaningless to talk about human nature as a trait of the species.

Still, Midgley is on to something here: most reductionist talk about human nature overlooks the variety among individuals, assuming that all men are alike, and all women are alike, all blacks, Hispanics, and so on, even though if "science" can be said to have shown everything, it is that we are all different from each other in important ways, and that the variation within groups often exceeds the average variation between them.  It may well be "human nature" to ignore such differences -- but if it is, so much the worse for human nature.

So, for a hot-button contemporary example, there's been a fuss over the women who passed Army Ranger camp recently.  Can women meet the exacting standards of this elite terrorist group? the media asked.  Well, not all women can, any more than all men can; but it's not obvious a priori that no women can.  It would be surprising if none could, given a fair chance to do so.  The same goes for any discussion of race, sex, etc., as it affects ability to do science, math, music, or any other human endeavor.  Every few years somebody, usually a sports journalist, tries to argue a scientific case that people of African descent are innately better at sports than white people, which explains why there are so many blacks in elite sports nowadays.  This project is touted as a bold defiance of Political Correctness, of course.  Whatever the validity of the science involved, there always seems to lurk the assumption that if you're good at sports, you're not good at anything else, and shouldn't be allowed to do anything else.  Analogously, there's no doubt that human females "evolved" to bear young, but that doesn't imply that all women must bear children or that they can't also do art, science, sports, or anything else.  The same illogic would dictate that, since males evolved to supply spermatazoa, we are good for nothing else.  But whatever ideas about "human nature" can be used to bolster the status quo qualify as "common sense."

The problem then is not "human nature" -- which doesn't settle anything -- but how we think about it.  And while I'm mostly on Midgley's side, she seems to miss most of what's important about how we think about it.  If I want to study mathematics or nuclear physics or basketball or poetry or the violin, it doesn't matter whether males or whites or any other group does better on average at those tasks.  Regardless of who I am, the odds are overwhelmingly against my excelling compared to the very best individuals in the field.  There's no way to know in advance how well I'll do, and there's no reason why I must be the best anyway.  One of the reasons why the concept of "meritocracy" is so malign is that it tends to devalue everyone who isn't in the top rank of achievement.  It seems to me that "human nature" only functions negatively, to tell certain people they can't do what they'd like to do, that they must do what they don't particularly want to do, or to excuse bad behavior by the privileged on the grounds that it's just human nature.  I can't think of any positive uses the concept could have.  I'm not denying, mind you, that there is such a thing as human nature; only that we don't seem to be able to say anything useful about it.

Please, Sir, May I Have Another Question?: An Object Lesson

Now that I've read Steven Maras's Objectivity in Journalism (Polity Press, 2013), I still don't know what objectivity in journalism is.  But neither does he, nor apparently can anyone else make up their minds on a definition.  I suspect, and the book largely confirms, that "objectivity" is one of what I call totem words: words that connote something good, to be waved around like a flag to show that one is one of the Good Guys.  (Other examples are "meritocracy," "democracy," "freedom," "equality," and so on.)

Objectivity in Journalism is part of a series on "Key Concepts in Journalism," but I wonder about its intended audience.  I'd guess journalism students, probably undergraduates, but I can't imagine them getting much from Maras's treatment.  He covers a wide range of concerns, such as the history of the concept of objectivity, its different definitions and rationales, and its variations in different countries (most of the examples come from the United States and to a lesser extent England).  This is valuable and well done but he tends to rush along so that nothing really gets discussed.  I wondered if he simply meant his readers to read the material he quotes and references, some of which sounds quite interesting, and that would probably be a good idea because Maras himself seems to have no opinions of his own.  Maybe he is just trying to provide an example of objectivity in action, merely reporting the views of his sources, but that doesn't work very well, and actually undermines the case for objectivity he seems to want to make.

As the word is used, "objectivity" can indicate an ideal for journalists to aspire to, a goal for them to try to reach, or an actual achievement of modern professional journalists.  Not only do different writers disagree which it is, the same writers tend to equivocate, using it in one sense here, and in another sense there. Even those who see it as an ideal or a goal are not sure what it entails.  Some writers pile up defining components -- accuracy, freedom from bias, balance, impartiality, impersonality -- which may or not be desirable, but I'm not sure they add up to objectivity, except perhaps by postulation.  (As so often with definitions, the discussants are not sure whether the meaning of a concept is inherent in the word, and so can be discovered by somehow unpacking it, or whether it's a more or less empty container in which anything can be stored.  In practice it works out to be some of both, so that one reads one's own ideas into the word, and gets them back endowed with its authority.)

So, for instance, Maras quotes the philosopher Judith Lichtenberg, who,

[i]n her essay ‘In Defense of Objectivity’, ... focuses on a particular confusion in critiques of objectivity: ‘We are told by some that journalism isn’t objective; by others that it cannot be objective; and by still others that it shouldn’t be objective’. Objectivity is thus impossible on the one hand, and undesirable on the other. Both propositions cannot be correct [103].

Erm, well, I don't think so, especially since it appears to be different writers who raise these different objections.  The case against objectivity may not be coherent, but individual authors may not be contradicting themselves; but then as Maras shows, the case for objectivity is just as confused.  We are told by some that journalism is objective, for example, but that it shouldn't be. Even so, it isn't confused to say that X is impossible, but would be undesirable even if it weren't.

Advocates of journalistic objectivity disagree among themselves over what they're advocating.  Does objectivity mean no more than "passive" reporting of whatever a source says, an approach often derogated as mere stenography?  The possibility of a human agent, however well trained, simply recording whatever happens in front of him, has been taken apart so often and so thoroughly that it's hard to believe anyone still takes it seriously.  But some do.  Notoriously, in January 2012 the New York Times public editor (or ombudsman) Arthur J. Brisbane asked (via) for "reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about ... And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair?  Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?"  This set off a wave of debate in the media, much of it highly critical, and Maras discusses it too, mainly summarizing some of the reaction and using it to introduce "many of the themes of this chapter: enhanced feedback, transparency in deliberation, the problematic nature of consistent and total objectivity" (174).  Here he begs the question, assuming that "consistent and total objectivity" consists of stenography, parroting the assertions of "newsmakers."  (Analogously, Chris Hayes assumed that a standardized test is an accurate and "objective" measure of academic merit.)

Brisbane asserted that "Op-Ed columnists have the freedom to call out what they think are lies" (173), but as FAIR pointed out, this isn't true: "During the 2000 presidential election season, [Paul] Krugman said the Times 'barred him from using the word "lying"' when writing about George W. Bush (Washington Post, 1/22/03)."  FAIR went on to suggest that "sports reporters would [not] be so baffled by the idea that facts matter"; if a professional basketball player were falsify his game stats, for example, sportswriters wouldn't let the misrepresentations stand.

I would point out that "newsmakers" aren't always American politicians or corporate elites.  When foreign newsmakers like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden make statements of fact that aren't factual, American media feel no obligation to let them go unchallenged.  (And not only foreigners: today I passed in front of a TV tuned to CNN, which was quoting and analyzing an online chat with American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: the commentator didn't seem to give any credence at all to Snowden's statements.  ("Mr. Snowden is trying for humor here," she sniffed.  Is that objectivity?)  If Iranian or Iraqi media quoted them without comment and justified themselves on the grounds of "objectivity," I doubt American journalists would agree.  Such media elsewhere in the world would be dismissed as supine state media functioning as conduits for propaganda -- which seems unfair, since such behavior is defended in the New York Times as appropriate for American media; but if the shoe fits ... (And yet, state media around the world make obeisance to the ideal of objectivity; see Maras's quotation of Xinhua News Agency on page 202. Surely they wouldn't say it if they didn't mean it!)  Brisbane's attitude toward "facts" also seems odd: far from the tough-minded devotion to sacred facts journalists like to claim, Brisbane seems to regard facts as slippery and difficult to establish.  But though the latter position is probably more defensible, it would also require journalists to be more scrupulous about what they accept as facts.

Maras devotes several pages to the BBC's emergence as a major player in British news coverage during the General Strike of 1926, which disabled the print media.

Seizing the opportunity, the BBC Director-General John Reigh and the BBC Chairman prior to the incorporation (and Vice-Chairman afterwards), Lord Gainford, defined an alternative path, and maintained press freedom by committing to impartiality. Impartiality, activated as a principle to get around political and commercial sensitivities, arose in the context of the general strike as a way to ensure the Government applied to censorship pressure; but it also meant, in the view of some researchers, that the BBC censored itself by refusing to report anything which might help the strikers [217].

I imagine Pravda had that much "press freedom" and "impartiality."

Even if impartiality was compromised in this way – or as Tracey puts it, defined constitutionally rather than politically ... – at least the information was objective and factual: ‘a conscious decision was made to distinguish between agency copy and government copy; and many of the items broadcast were accurate reports of verifiable events’ [218].

Again, any supine state media could make the same boast.  I can't detect any irony in Maras's discussion here; he seems to be working with a definition of "objective" that means basically stenography of government sources.  In which case objectivity is certainly possible, but is it desirable?

Maras uses Brisbane's query to kick off his chapter "Is objectivity changing in an era of 24/7 news?" -- a question to which his answer appears to be "Yes."  He gives sympathetic space to journalists who argue that because of Bosnia, it's time to abandon outmoded twentieth-century objectivity and return to yellow journalism of the "Huns Kill Babies!" (and the closely related"Kuwaiti incubators") variety.  This goes with the time-honored belief that it's okay to be rational about trivial matters, but when things get serious one must run around in circles screaming in panic: "We've got to do something!"  Again, the question is begged whether the media ever were particularly objective, even by their own confused standards.

For example, CNN's Christiane Amanpour:

I have come to believe that objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally. Once you treat all sides the same in a case like Bosnia, you are drawing a moral equivalence between victim and aggressor. And from there it is a short distance to becoming an accessory to all manners of evil; in Bosnia’s case, genocide. So objectivity must go hand in hand with morality [quoted by Maras, 74].

And then former BBC reporter (later Member of Parliament) Martin Bell:

In proposing an alternative journalism – one that is both balanced and principled – I am not so much calling for a change as describing one that has already taken place. It had to. How else, for instance, were we to report on genocide? Were we to observe it from afar, pass by on the other side, and declare that it was none of our business? It was all our business, perhaps especially ours because we were the independent witnesses. And if genocide would not move us, nothing would move us, and what would that then say of us? [quoted by Maras, 126-7].

I'd begin by asking about criteria for genocide.  The numbers of people killed in Bosnia, though large, didn't approach in scale the numbers of people killed in other massacres that didn't disturb Western observers nearly as much: Suharto's killing of from 500,000 to 2 million of his fellow Indonesians, Suharto's 1975 invasion of East Timor, US/UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s which killed around a million Iraqis ("we think the price is worth it," the American Secretary of State told television viewers) followed by vast numbers of deaths in Bush's 2003 invasion, the war against Latin American Indians by US-supported military dictatorships in the 1980s, and so on.  These killings not only didn't get much attention in mainstream media (except for the 1965 Indonesian massacres, which were celebrated), they were either approved and supported by or directly carried out by the US and its clients.  Even when they are acknowledged, perhaps as tragic blunders by well-meaning humanitarians, they are still minimized.

Then I'd ask what what these "caring" journalists propose to do to stop or prevent the genocides they've discovered.  In Bosnia, the NATO invasion increased the number of atrocities, and this is not unusual.  So did the NATO invasion of Libya, which was also justified by touting the plight of Libyans under Qadafy's brutal heel, though it killed unknown numbers of civilians and replaced Qadafy with squabbling warlords not noticeably concerned about human rights.  We're now seeing pious concern about government atrocities (which are real, I'm not denying that) in Syria with calls to arm the rebels or create a no-fly-zone, which worked so well in Libya if all you want to do is remove a tyrant and kill more innocent people.

The next question would be what all this has to do with "objectivity."  If Amanpour or Bell want me to believe that Western media coverage of these atrocities was governed by objectivity, however defined, rather than compliance with state policy and interests, they need to do more than wave around the word "genocide."  They should also have some accountability for the results of their crusades.

Maras goes on to discuss "warbloggers" as a new phenomenon and a hopeful corrective to misguided objectivity.  I gather he's never heard of journalists like Edward R. Murrow or William Shirer, who worked from war zones seventy years ago; or Richard Dudman, who wrote of his experience as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia forty years ago.  (Murrow also recorded material for broadcast while flying with Allied bombing missions.)  He doesn't mention embedded journalists during the US invasion of Afghanistan, which especially is relevant to his subject.  (Nor does he mention Judith Miller, whose mendacious advocacy of Bush's war for the New York Times eventually got her into trouble -- but only after the damage was done.)  He writes, "In 2004, the network [Al-Jazeera] was accused of cooperating with insurgents [184]."  Couldn’t embedded American journalists be accused of cooperating with invaders and aggressors?  (Non-embedded journalists sometimes "became targets of US forces.")  One defender of embedding wrote, "One reporter was seen holding a blood-plasma bag during a battlefield transfusion. Not to've done so would've been barbaric; yet that was not watching and reporting with detached objectivity."  That's a straw-man idea of what journalistic objectivity means, and probably a false objection -- how would holding a blood-plasma bag interfere with observing and reporting? -- but even if you buy it, it's an argument against embedding journalists with combat troops.

"Objectivity is changing in the era of 24/7 news and on-line journalism in numerous ways," Maras concludes that chapter, though on his own showing, objectivity has been changing ever since it was first invoked as a journalistic ideal. Earlier he discusses empiricist theories that "assume the reporter to be a tabula rasa or blank slate of knowledge" (87), and quotes a writer who argues that "What objectivity requires is an active mind that uses its mental powers in ways that reduce the distortions of reports caused by wishful thinking, bad reasoning, petty feelings and personal interests" (100).  I agree with the latter view, and it occurred to me that though this kind of "naive empiricism" has been debunked many times, there are people who talk as though they believe that human beings are naturally objective, that we would naturally (instinctually?) see the Truth if only the world (our parents, "Society") didn't put blinders on us, of bias, superstition, ignorance and the like.  I think that's obviously false, and that distortions of perspective arise naturally and inevitably from the fact that we are bodies occupying space and so can't see from everywhere at once.  Though many anti-blank slate thinkers admit all this, once they'd done so they tend to minimize or ignore how difficult it is to see past our limitations.

This shows up, for example, in the admission (which Maras also makes) that reporters are not objective, any more than they are rational or know the truth by instinct: they must undergo training and constantly monitor themselves to produce professional work.  It would seem, then, that it is the result that is "objective."  But it's still not clear what "objective" means in that context, and the many meanings the word has in use don't help.  Anyone who wants to use it should first specify the meaning he or she has in mind, and then it becomes possible to ask whether they are living up to their own standard.  It appears to me that the word "objective" itself gets in the way.