In the Best Interests of the Scorpion

You know the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog, don't you?  A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river; the frog refuses, knowing that the scorpion will sting it; the scorpion declares that it wouldn't be in its interest to do that because then they both would die in the river; the frog consents, and halfway across the scorpion stings it anyway.  As they sink below the water, the frog asks why, and the scorpion replies, "I can't help it -- it's my nature."

Today I overheard one old man telling this story to another old man; the second man had never heard it before, which made me feel better that I hadn't known it before Forest Whitaker told it in The Crying Game thirty years ago.  The storyteller today made an odd change to the story: in his version the frog was a turtle.  But the outcome was the same: the scorpion stings, both die.  (The story does not, as Internet folkore may tell you, date back to Aesop. There may be versions which pit a turtle against the scorpion, but they apparently have different outcomes.)

Maybe I should have asked him about it, but I was more interested in how I thought the ending should have changed.  The scorpion stings the turtle, the turtle keeps on going.  The scorpion says, "Wait, I just stung you, why aren't you dying along with me in the water?"

The turtle replies, "I'm a turtle, not a frog; I didn't feel a thing.  But since you tried to kill me, I'll just throw you off and let you drown."

"No!" wails the scorpion.  "I was acting according to my nature!  It's not fair that you should let me die! What about my life?"

"Life is unfair," says the turtle, as it ducks quickly under the water.  The scorpion is washed off into the current and drowns.  The turtle climbs out onto the opposite bank and lives happily ever after.

What the original story means depends on who each character is made to represent.  Five years ago the capitalist propaganda outlet Forbes published an article which hilariously cast Big Government as the scorpion, Free-Market Entrepreneurs as the frog, and Larry Kudlow as a wise sage.  The idea, however, seems to be that Free Enterprise is a brutal fight between scorpions who turn into tender frogs if they let the Dang Gommint step in as referee.  (I know: What? The writer, who modestly bills himself "one of the leading tax experts in the political world today," can't even use a metaphor consistently.)  In this blog post, the scorpion is a business owner who just has to sell, no matter what - but that's a good thing.  A concern-trolling article at Daily Kos warned Congressional Republicans that they are the frog and Donald Trump is the scorpion.  And so on.

My modified version, of course, is also an interpretation, and reflects my biases.  I agree with these writers, who appear to be Randites (they quote the prophetess' word as Scripture) that the fable doesn't accurately reflect human nature, but I don't agree that human nature is a tabula rasa, which isn't necessary to make their point: that human beings can make choices.  One could also point out that the fable's message is about interactions between human beings, not different species.  In Rand's mythology rational individualists are at war with collectivist parasites, with whom they seem not to share a common nature.  But that's how animal fables work: human traits are assigned to different species.

Independently of this tale, we're commonly told that human nature makes us scorpions or frogs.  There are winners and losers, elites and the canaille, superior richies and inferior Poors, "those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are; without imposing on themselves toward perfection".  Those who ride on the backs of others, stingers at the ready, comfort themselves with the belief that it's their nature to be on top.  No one knows where individual differences in temperament come from, but they're not set in stone.  The turtle can throw the scorpion off.

Doing What Comes Naturally

I considered adding this to yesterday's post, but decided I might as well start a new one.  Midgley also wrote in Heart and Mind:

Now it is exactly this variety, this obstinate innate uniqueness of each human being, that gives real force to the demands for political freedom.  Mill, in his Essay on Liberty, emphasized it constantly and correctly with organic metaphors.  People, he said, are like trees which should have their full shape and not be pollarded; like human feet, which should have their natural growth and not be bound.  

Like human hair, which should have its natural growth and not be cut or bound or dyed?  Like the human body, which should go naked and not be covered by clothing?  “Nature” in this sense starts to stretch too much, and those organic metaphors bump up against real practice, such as longstanding human manipulation of the breeding and culture of non-human species.  Is it bad to trim a tree, to mow your lawn, to domesticate plants or animals for food and other purposes?  We expect a more hands-off approach to human beings (though some of us fantasize about breeding people as we breed dogs or cattle), but the organic metaphors Midgley approves break down there.

But stick to people: I wonder what that Victorian gentleman John Stuart Mill thought about contraception?  Abortion?  Homosexuality?  Celibacy?  Chastity?  For his time he was a very advanced supporter of women's autonomy, but I haven't yet read The Subjection of Women and don't know the details of his opinions.  Sex-reassignment surgery didn't exist then, and it's interesting to speculate what he would have thought of it.  Transsexuals don't think they are going against their natural growth, of course: they insist that they're expressing it.  And who can say?  But human intervention in nature, our own or other organisms', is too widespread and general to be dismissed as lightly as Mill did according to Midgley.

In the real world, “nature” is limited not by innate gifts but by the environment.  But then, "the environment" is often just another word for "nature": a drought for example, or a plague, or a fire, or an asteroid strike.  Or, as in Mill's case, a driving father who was determined to make him into a genius.  As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "His childhood was not unhappy, but it was a strain on his constitution and he suffered from the lack of natural, unforced development."  I wondered when I read this passage if Mill didn't have his own experience in mind when he said these things.  But that raises another point about "nature": Mill would not have been the person he became if not for his controlling father, and would not have written what he did in the way he did.  If he'd been born in England with the identical "nature" a thousand years earlier, he'd have turned out very differently.

They shouldn’t have a single stereotype, he insisted – and that is why we need a rich, varied, hospitable, enterprising society.  But if they were not innately unique, if they were naturally indeterminate, there would be no objection to pouring the lot of them into standard moulds.  It is quite time that the radical Left got rid of this confusion, this dead beetle which is poisoning its concept of freedom [42].

I'm not sure I can disentangle Mill from Midgley here, but I think this passage confirms my impression that when she wrote that "each person is different in kind" from birth, that by "human nature" she meant individual human nature.  That's all well and good, but I don't think it's the usual commonsense meaning of the term; people may say "that's his nature" of an individual's quirks, but "human nature" usually refers to the species.

And what if one's nature drives one to do terrible things?  People have often tried to find a way around this problem, by postulating that the terrible things are not the result of nature but of being carefully taught the wrong way to behave.  I don't think so.  Nature isn't as red in tooth and claw as some romantics like to think, but it's not all sunshine, rainbows and lollipops either.  Hyenas are part of nature as surely as butterflies are.  This only means that we needn't be, mustn't be nonjudgmental about nature either.  It may not be pleasant, but some natures must be bound, pollarded, and even extinguished; and we must take responsibility for our judgments and how we act on them.  (I think this was roughly what Sartre had in mind with his denials of human nature and the necessity of choice.  If I'm wrong about that, no matter: it's what I have in mind.)

What made this passage stick with me, though, was Midgley's apparent assumption that "unique" is the opposite of "indeterminate", and that those unique individual natures are somehow fixed from birth.  That may very well be so, but it needs to be argued, not asserted.  It seems to me that human nature, both at the species and the individual level is indeterminate.  That's not to say it's unbounded, or infinitely malleable, but everything we know about the interaction of genetic endowment and experience / environment, to say nothing of human beings' capacity for learning, tells us that organisms are both unique and indeterminate.

As an example of the uniqueness and determinacy she has in mind, Midgley declares:

The fascinating thing here is not just the capacity, but the interest which goes with it.  Our faculties demand use; we need to do what we are fitted for.  That delightful wood-engraver, Thomas Bewick [1753-1828] was the son of a small farmer in a lonely part of Northumberland.  He tells in his Memoir how from his earliest years he used to draw pictures, with anything he could get and on any surface he could find, although nobody suggested this to him and on the whole people discouraged him.  ‘At that time’, he goes on, ‘I had never heard of the word “drawing”, nor did I know of any other paintings besides the king’s arms in the church, and the signs in Ovingham of the Black Bull and other inns.’

Bewick, in fact, was a born draughtsman ...  Such people exist.  Therefore, there has to be something wrong with a concept of freedom which can’t accommodate them.  Certainly, they show that freedom has its limits.  Nobody is free to have somebody else’s gifts as well as his own, or instead of them [41]. 

This is true of certain individuals, but not of all.  Not everyone has the kind of early-onset vocation that someone like Bewick exhibited.  I'm not sure what I myself was born "fitted for"; it's hard to see how either reading or writing could be inborn, since these abilities are human inventions.  Drawing, we know, is older, but what kind of innate endowment would produce a "born draughtsman"?  I have a good ear for music, a decent voice and the dexterity to play guitar adequately, but no driving need to make music above all else.  I can also draw fairly well but never worked at it.  I sometimes liked to tease people I knew by saying that I was born to be a dishwasher, since I fit so well into that job for thirty years.

In the communitarian society she imagined for her 1976 science-fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy addressed questions like this.  Of one character we are told that she "does not switch jobs but is permanent head of this house of children" because:

Sometimes a gift expresses itself so strongly, like Jackrabbit's need to create color and form, like Magdalena's need to work with children, that it shapes a life.  Person must not do what person cannot do -- you have heard us say that a hundred times; but likewise, person must do what person has to do.

Most people, however, are expected to work at certain service jobs rather than identify themselves with one office.  Even Jackrabbit, the artist also mentioned, must work on food and other production, cleaning and so on; he must also go on defense against the mega-corporations that menace his community.  Connie, the novel's protagonist from the 1970s, is shocked to learn this: he's an artist, shouldn't he be free to commune with his muse?  Why risk such a talented person on defense?

Most of the characters in Woman on the Edge of Time are doubled, in the 1970s present of Connie, the protagonist, and the 2130s of Mouth-of-Mattapoisett.  One reason for this is to suggest how the environment shapes whatever innate characteristics a person has.  Jackrabbit's 1970s counterpart is Skip, a young gay man committed for to a mental hospital for electroshock by his parents in an effort to "cure" him; if he has a "need to create color and form," he never gets a chance to express it.

Luciente, Connie's guide in Mattapoisett, says of her daughter:

"At four, Dawn was timid.  We worried.  Me, my [co-mothers].  We all struggled to bring per out."

[Connie] "But you say you respect difference." 

"Different strengths we respect.  Not weakness.  What is the use in not actively engaging life?  It passes anyhow."

I'm sure that Midgley, who's a mother herself, knows this: respecting each child's individuality doesn't mean that one never intervenes to encourage growth in what seems a desirable direction.  Contrary to her paraphrase of Mill, some interference and shaping, conscious or not, is inevitable in the raising of human children, because of their long period of dependency and their great capacity for learning. What is desirable, though, is not determined by "nature" but by ideological preconceptions, and decided by judgment.  Somewhere I read that in 'the West' babies are seen as dependent beings who must learn to be independent and take care of themselves, while in Japan (and perhaps elsewhere in 'the East') babies are seen as little egoists who must learn to be connected to, and interdependent with other people.  This is probably an overgeneralization, like most generalizations about cultures, but the point is that babies aren't different in Japan and the United States, but the way they are seen and the expectations for them are.  Both of these ways of thinking about babies seem true to me at the same time: they are dependent, but they're also little egoists who must learn to co-exist with others.  "Human nature," whether we're speaking of individuals or of the species, is self-contradictory at its root. Woman on the Edge of Time is, among other things, a book about human nature, but I suspect it would annoy Midgley for dealing with questions she doesn't care to engage.  (A couple of years after Heart and Mind, Midgley co-wrote an awful book on feminism that I hope to dissect here one of these days.)

Another reason why talk about nature, human or otherwise, runs into fatal difficulties is that nature has history -- that is, a sequence of changes that can't be predicted though they can, with luck, be described in hindsight.  The pitfall of doing so is that, no doubt also as part of human nature, the historian is tempted to find a story in the sequence: an ordered, causal narrative, which implies that with a bit more wisdom one could have predicted how it would turn out.  Darwinian evolution is the anti-story of change in Nature.  Not only do languages and other cultural features change over time and from place to place, but the biology of organisms changes too.  It's indeterminate -- not infinitely malleable but not fixed in place either.

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.

Just Our DNA Talking; or, Why Do They Hate Our Science?

Human nature has been Mary Midgley's primary philosophical topic since her first book, Beast and Man, was published in 1978.  She always does a good job of criticizing scientific pretension and confusion, but as I know very well, criticism is much easier than constructing a better alternative.  As I reread Heart and Mind, her second book, I began having reservations about a lot that she said about human nature.

It's fun to take apart the absurdities peddled by biological imperialists, of course.  Midgley gives us these gems from Edward O. Wilson, who "with endearing abandon ... shows his flag:"

The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized (Sociobiology p. 562).  Having cannibalized psychology, the new neurobiology will yield an enduring set of first principles for sociology (p. 573).  We must shift from automatic control based on our biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge (On Human Nature p. 6).  Neurobiology cannot be learnt at the feet of a guru ... Ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely wise (p. 7) [Heart and Mind, 19].

Ethical philosophy must not be left in the hands of the merely stupid either.  Oh well, that's just his DNA talking.  I recall how many defenders of sociobiology's newer avatar, evolutionary psychology, lament that social scientists, leftists, and feminists simply dismissed Wilson's scientific truth out of hand, attacking him personally because they Hate Science.  If Wilson wanted his ideas to be taken seriously, he should have come up with something other than these simple-minded Village Atheist cliches.

It appears that Wilson shared Richard Dawkins's fantasy that human beings, especially scientists, are somehow able to "transcend" our genes.  As the molecular biologist Gunther S. Stent wrote of Dawkins at about the same time Midgley published Heart and Mind,

The notion of transcendence of our evolutionary genetic heritage has, in fact, been a characteristic, essentially apologist, stance taken by many ethologists that have made claims for the moral relevance of animal studies. Such ethologists usually first show why evolution has endowed us with a selfish, aggressive, and on the whole, rather nasty set of genes. They then reject the seemingly justified accusation that they are providing a naturalistic justification for an immoral society. To make this rejection, they claim that, on the contrary, they are paving the way for the City of God by pinpointing those beastly aspects of our human genetic heritage that we must struggle to “transcend.”  But the idea of any organism, including man, transcending its genes is a biological absurdity. Within the context of biology as a branch of natural science, and upon proper consideration of any conceivably scientifically valid relation between the genome and phenome, transcendence of genes is no more possible than natural selection of the unfit.*

But Midgley also quotes Wilson walking back from the precipice of genetic transcendence (page 22):

If the brain is a machine of 10 billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect -- we are biological and our souls cannot fly free (On Human Nature, p. 1).  [Italics Midgley's.]

The other thing to notice is that Wilson demands that biologists be allowed to steer society when they have not (not then and not since) come up with any findings that would justify their doing so. This is like someone with no flight training experience -- or indeed, someone who has already crashed several planes -- demanding to pilot an airliner.  As Richard Lewontin wrote in his introduction to Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense,** "Despite its recurring failure, the ideology of genetic reductionism persists."

If the mind could be explained -- the "somehow" acknowledges that it hasn't been, yet, and (more important) that Wilson has no idea how it might be done in the first place -- as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions then, maybe, neurobiologists might have something to contribute to ethical discourse.  (Probably not, though, since it would then follow that neurobiology is the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, and control by neurobiologists would be merely automatic control based on our biological properties.) That will have to be seen if they ever actually produce their explanation.  But Wilson merely postulates that it can be done, and as Bertrand Russell said, postulating has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Midgley generously allows that Wilson coudn't possibly believe that, "as his language constantly suggests, genes or DNA were conscious agents, sitting in some inner Kremlin and masterminding events."  (I'm not nearly as generous.)  She concludes that he must mean that "the essential or real self is the biological self, that what biology tells us about ourselves matters supremely, and is the only sort of psychology that does matter" (23-4).  But she stresses that "Wilson has no idea at all of the scale on which conceptual analysis is needed, or the enormous part it plays in life" (20), and concludes that "Not to mince words, Wilson's impression that no special methods of thought are used or needed in this area is a monstrous piece of ignorance, as bad as the ignorance of science which he rightly deplores in humanists" (21).

I completely agree that human beings are "biological" and our brains are "biological," but we are biological in a way that current biology has not yet begun to grasp fully.  It would be different if Wilson had a fully-worked out biology for human beings that could explain everything that the social sciences and humanities try to work with now; but he doesn't, and no one does, so he's laying claim to a territory he doesn't even know how to map, and trying to deny other explorers access to it.  This is a scientific dog-in-the-manger attitude, which needn't be respected.

It would be as churlish to declare dogmatically that biologists never will be able to explain human society purely in terms of brain function, as it would be to say that Christ will never return on clouds of glory, seated at the right hand of power.  But it's not churlish, and in fact it's obligatory, to stress that contrary to their hints and suggestions and sometimes explicit claims, they haven't yet explained it.

To be continued.

* From his introduction to Gunther Stent (editor), Morality as a Biological Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, rev. ed. 1980), p. 12.
** Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Gregory Gruber (Harvard, 2013).

A Matter of Opinion

I just read Occupy, Noam Chomsky's new pamphlet of interviews and speeches on the Occupy movement.  It's a slim volume, and there's nothing new in it, but it's always interesting to read what Chomsky has to say.  (The appendix by the National Lawyers' Guild on dealing with police and arrest, however, will be immediately useful to many people.)  One bit that caught my attention was a question and Chomsky's answer to it in an interview with an NYU student:

The late British philosopher, Martin Hollis, worked extensively on questions of human action, the philosophy of social science and rationality.  One of the claims he made was that any anarchist vision of a society rests upon an idea of human nature that is too optimistic.  In short, he argued that anarchism is only viable if humans by nature are good.  He says that history shows us that humans cannot be trusted to this degree; thus, anarchism is too idealistic.  Would you mind responding to this objection very quickly, given your commitment to some of the ideals of anarchism?

It's possible to respond to arguments.  It is not possible to respond to opinions.  If someone makes an assertion saying, "Here's what I believe," that's fine -- he can say what he believes, but you can't respond to it.  You can ask, what is the basis for your belief?  Or, can you provide me with some evidence?  What do you know about human nature?  Actually, we don't know very much about human nature.  So yes, that's an expression of his belief, and he's entitled to make it.  We have no idea, nor does he have any idea, if it's true or false.  But it doesn't really matter; whatever the truth turns out to be, we will follow the same policies, namely, trying to optimize and maximize freedom, justice, participation, democracy.  Those are goals that we'll attempt to realize.  Maybe human beings are such that there's a limit to how far they can be realized; okay, we'll still follow the same policies.  So whatever one's un-argued assertions may be, it has very little effect on the policy and choices [66-7].

I disagree with Chomsky on several points here.  I think you can respond to opinions.  I'd consider the kinds of questions he suggests to be responses to opinions.  Chomsky has certainly spent more time debating people in his career than I have, and he has his own approach, but to me it seems important not to let opinions stand unanswered or uncriticized.  I've encountered many people who believe that their opinions should be "respected" without question or criticism, but I haven't observed that they draw a distinction between arguments and opinions: they just won't tolerate any disagreement with their beliefs (though they feel free to disagree with the beliefs of others).

Besides, it looks to me like Hollis was making an argument, though I can't be sure since I can't look at his own words; the interviewer doesn't give a source, and I haven't found one online.  It looks like he was arguing something like this:

If anarchism is to work, human nature must be good.
But human nature is bad.
Therefore anarchism can't work.

It's a badly flawed argument, but it's an argument, and a response can be made to it.  It's flawed, first, because "good" and "bad" beg numerous questions about human nature.  (A Randian Objectivist, for instance, would consider selfishness and a refusal to cooperate with other people as "good.")  It's flawed because of its assumptions about what anarchism requires in order to work, and also about what it would mean for anarchism or any other political system to work.  These are objections that would have to be answered before you even get to Chomsky's, valid as they are: we don't know enough about human nature to say whether or not anarchism is compatible with it, and even if we did, we wouldn't necessarily be required to behave in ways that we consider wrong.

The anarchist Paul Goodman addressed virtually the same objection forty years ago, in his last public speech, reprinted in a posthumous collection of his political writings, Drawing the Line (Free Life Editions, 1977).

Question: But people are naturally greedy – without some political compulsion they’ll do harm to each other and never reform.

Goodman: Let’s assume, as you say, that people are greedy. First, people are just what they are; the beauty of the decentralist, anarchist position is that nobody can do much harm. As an anarchist, and all anarchists are decentralists, our view is not that human nature is good, but on the contrary, that human nature is probably lousy. It’s improvable, but probably lousy. People are corrupt as hell, therefore don’t give anybody any power, because that’s where the trouble comes from, because the people who have power are not going to be better than the other people. In fact we know that the more power people have the more corrupt they become. Let’s make sure that everybody has an independent free-hold of their own, and if they’ve got that then there will be a limit to how bad things can get. And that’s all you want out of politics. You don’t want politics to give you a good society. All you want is a tolerable background so the important parts of life can go on. We all know what the important parts are, the arts, the science, sex, justice, worship of God, love of nature. The political things are insignificant. But if they are bad, wow, can they cause damage. I don’t want to change human nature. I couldn’t care less. All I want to make sure is that there are enough goods to go around, and there will be enough goods to go around in this highly productive and intelligent race, on this highly productive planet, if you don’t allow it to get concentrated [271-2].

As Goodman said, even if you grant the assumption that people are naturally "greedy" (which I suspect is close to Hollis's), it doesn't follow that some people should therefore be allowed power over others -- the opposite, in fact.  The same people who hold that human nature is essentially greedy and corrupt tend to be the same people who support hierarchies of power.  I don't know whether they believe that some people are less greedy and corrupt than others, and therefore can be trusted with that power, or that pyramidal hierarchies somehow keep those at the top from abusing their power.  Experience would seem to suggest that neither is true in any case, so it is at least a fair to question to ask how to prevent such abuses, and Goodman's anarchist answer -- make sure no one has much power -- is reasonable.  (How to get from a centralized, hierarchical society to a decentralized anarchist one is another question, which numerous anarchists, including Chomsky, have addressed.  Only the very young, I think, believe that the process will be easy or short, but then the young are more inclined to believe that five years is a long time.)

The biblical scholar James Barr made a similar point in his writings about fundamentalism, though it extends to conservative Christianity in general: the same Christians who insist on the inescapability of human sinfulness tend to structure their churches according to a cult of personality which quietly exempts their leaders from Original Sin, with scandals both small and large resulting.  On the secular side, there are the various forms of social Darwinism, which claim that people who make large amounts of money or achieve high political office have proven their superiority to their fellows, by definition.  As Chomsky wrote at around the same time Goodman made that speech (in For Reasons of State [Random House, 1973], 375):

One might speculate, rather plausibly, that wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain, and so on. Furthermore, these traits might very well be as heritable as IQ, and might outweigh IQ as factors in gaining material reward. Such qualities just might be the valuable ones for a war of all against all. If so, the society that results (applying [Richard] Herrnstein's "syllogism") could hardly be characterized as a "meritocracy." By using the word "meritocracy" Herrnstein begs some interesting questions and reveals implicit assumptions about our society that are hardly self-evident.

As Chomsky says at the outset, this is speculation -- but so are the opinions he and Goodman opposed.  If Chomsky's speculation pointed us in the right direction, though, we'd face another difficulty: it would mean that "human nature" is not uniform, and that some people appear to be constitutionally unsuited to living peaceably and cooperatively with others.  If anything, it's those who become our rulers who would have to be recognized as the dangerously inferior breed of Homo Sapiens, not the many. How would an anarchist society, which rejects compulsion, deal with such people?

There's plenty of evidence (most recently gathered and discussed by Rebecca Solnit and Alfie Kohn) that people prefer to cooperate, even in times of great stress.  Once again the notion that people need to be repressed when there's a disaster, that the only alternative is rioting and mob rule, turns out to be a projection by those who have scrambled to the top, and assume that the majority of people are like them.  Whenever someone stresses the human potential for cooperation and nonviolent forms of conflict resolution, there's bound to be someone else who derides it as a wishful kissyface-huggybear hippie fantasy.  From what I've seen, that's not the case either: those who stress cooperation don't suppose an absence of conflict, only that conflicts needn't be resolved by violence.  Nor do they postulate the disappearance of greed and selfishness, they are arguing that these traits needn't be regarded as the human default.  In practice, despite their occasional crocodile tears about the horrors of war, or the dreadfulness of rape, the critics of cooperation clearly prefer war as the first resort of international conflict resolution, and they're much more upset by the possibility that men might be restrained from forcibly making sperm deposits than they are by the suffering of the victims. (Indeed, as I've pointed out before, many men have real trouble telling the difference between rape and consensual sex.)

Beware the (self-styled) clear-eyed realists who cheerfully accept the necessity of hierarchy and violence -- for other people -- and lightly dismiss other possibilities.  The assumptions they select reveal what really turns them on.