In the economic or social
contract
tradition, society is an arrangement negotiated by rational, self-interested individuals.
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
Similarly, the desire for retribution has been awakened: juries have slapped tobacco companies with staggering financial penalties, appropriately called "punitive damages.
" This is not to say that these decisions are unjustified, only that we should be aware of the emotions that may be driving them.
At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switching (in the eyes of many people) from moral flaws to lifestyle choices.
The amoralized acts include divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, marijuana use, homosexuality, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, atheism, and any practice of a non-Western culture.
Similarly, many afflictions have been reassigned from the wages of sin to the vagaries of bad luck and have been redubbed accordingly.
{276} The homeless used to be called bums and tramps; sexually transmitted diseases were formerly known as venereal diseases.
Most of the professionals who work with drug addiction insist that it is not a bad choice but a kind of illness.
To the cultural right, all this shows that morality has been under assault from the cultural elite, as we see in the sect that calls itself the Moral Majority.
To the left, it shows that the desire to stigmatize private behavior is archaic and repressive, as in H.
L.
Mencken's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
" Both sides are wrong.
As if to compensate for all the behaviors that have been amoralized in recent decades, we are in the midst of a campaign to moralize new ones.
The Babbitts and the bluenoses have been replaced by the activists for a nanny state and the college towns with a foreign policy, but the psychology of moralization is the same.
Here are some examples of things that have acquired a moral coloring only recently:
advertising to children ? automobile safety ? Barbie dolls ? "big box" chain stores ? cheesecake photos ? clothing from Third World factories ? consumer product safety ? corporate-owned farms ? defense- funded research ? disposable diapers ? disposable packaging ? ethnic jokes ? executive salaries ? fast food ? flirtation in the workplace ? food additives ? fur ? hydroelectric dams ? IQ tests ? logging ? mining ? nuclear power ? oil drilling ? owning certain stocks ? poultry farms ? public holidays (Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day) ? research on AIDS ? research on breast cancer ? spanking ? suburbia ("sprawl") ? sugar ? tax cuts ? toy guns ? violence on television ? weight of fashion models
Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste. Pollution, for example, is often treated as a crime of defiling the sacred, as in the song by the rock group Traffic: "Why don't we . . . try to save this land, and make a promise not to hurt again this holy ground. " This can be contrasted with the attitude of economists like Robert Frank, who (alluding to the costs of cleanups) said, "There is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. " Moreover, all human activities have consequences, often with various degrees of benefit and harm to different
parties, but not all of them are conceived as immoral. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms, takes his family on a driving vacation (multiplying their risk of accidental death), or moves to a rural area (increasing pollution {277} and fuel use in commuting and shopping). Driving a gas-guzzling SUV is seen as morally dubious, but driving a gas-guzzling Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is suspect, but eating imported cheese or tiramisu is not. Becoming aware of the psychology of moralization need not make us morally obtuse. On the contrary, it can alert us to the possibility that a decision to treat an act in terms of virtue and sin as opposed to cost and benefit has been made on morally irrelevant grounds -- in particular, whether the saints and sinners would be in one's own coalition or someone else's. Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
~
? ? There is another bit of moral psychology that is commonly associated with primitive thinking but is alive and well in
modern minds: concepts of the sacred and the taboo. Some values are considered not just worthy but sacrosanct. They have infinite or transcendental worth, trumping all other considerations. One is not permitted even to think of trading them off against other values, because the very thought is self-evidently sinful and deserves only condemnation and outrage.
The psychologist Philip Tetlock elicited the psychology of the sacred and the taboo in the students of American universities. 14 He asked them whether people should be allowed to buy and sell organs for transplantation, auction licenses to adopt orphans, pay for the right to become a citizen, sell their vote in an election, or pay someone to serve in their stead in prison or the military. Not surprisingly, most of the students thought that the practices were unethical and should be outlawed. But their responses went well beyond disagreement: they were outraged that anyone would consider legalizing these practices, were insulted to have been asked, and wanted to punish anyone who tolerated them. When they were asked to justify their opinion, all they could say was that the practices were "degrading, dehumanizing, and unacceptable. " The students even sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering to campaign against a (fictitious) movement to legalize the auctioning of adoption rights. Their outrage was reduced a bit, but was still potent, after hearing arguments in favor of the taboo policies, such as that a market in orphans would put more children in loving homes and that lower-income people would be given vouchers to participate.
Another study asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs. (Administrators implicitly face this kind of choice all the time, because there are lifesaving procedures that are astronomically expensive and cannot be carried out on everyone who needs them. ) Not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on {278} the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision (like the frugal comedian Jack Benny when a mugger said, "Your money or your life").
The taboo on thinking about core values is not totally irrational. We judge people not just on what they do but on what they are -- not just on whether someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were ever in his interests to do so. To determine whether someone is emotionally committed to a relationship, guaranteeing the veracity of his promises, one should ascertain how he thinks: whether he holds your interests sacred or constantly weighs them against the profits to be made by selling you out. The notion of character joins the moral picture, and with it the notion of moral identity: the concept of one's own character that is maintained internally and projected to others.
Tetlock points out that it is in the very nature of our commitments to other people to deny that we can put a price on them: "To transgress these normative boundaries, to attach a monetary value to one's friendships or one's children or one's loyalty to one's country, is to disqualify oneself from certain societal roles, to demonstrate that one just 'doesn't get it' -- one does not understand what it means to be a true friend or parent or citizen. "15 Taboo tradeoffs, which pit a sacred value against a secular one (such as money), are "morally corrosive: the longer one contemplates indecent proposals, the more irreparably one compromises one's moral identity. "16
Unfortunately, a psychology that treats some desiderata as having infinite value can lead to absurdities. Tetlock reviews some examples. The Delaney Clause of the Food and Drug Act of 1958 sought to improve public health by banning all new food additives for which there was any risk of carcinogenicity. That sounded good but wasn't. The policy left people exposed to more dangerous food additives that were already on the market, it created an incentive for manufacturers to introduce new dangerous additives as long as they were not carcinogenic, and it outlawed products that could have saved more lives than they put at risk, such as the saccharin used by diabetics. Similarly after the discovery of hazardous waste at the Love Canal in 1978, Congress passed the Superfund Act, which required the complete cleanup of all hazardous waste sites. It turned out to cost millions of dollars to clean up the last 10 percent of the waste at a given site -- money that could have been spent on cleaning up other sites or reducing other health risks. So the lavish fund went bankrupt before even a fraction of its sites could be decontaminated, and its effect on Americans' health was debatable. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, four-fifths of the respondents in one poll said that the country should pursue greater environmental protection "regardless of cost. " Taken literally, that meant they were prepared to shut down all schools, hospitals, and police and {279} fire stations, stop funding social programs, medical research, foreign aid, and national defense, or raise the income tax rate to 99 percent, if that is what it would have cost to protect the environment.
Tetlock observes that these fiascoes came about because any politician who honestly presented the inexorable tradeoffs would be crucified for violating a taboo. He would be guilty of "tolerating poisons in our food and water," or worse, "putting a dollar value on human life. " Policy analysts note that we are stuck with wasteful and inegalitarian entitlement programs because any politician who tried to reform them would be committing political suicide. Savvy opponents would frame the reform in the language of taboo: "breaking our faith with the elderly," "betraying the sacred trust of veterans who risked their lives for their country," "scrimping on the care and education of the young. "
? ? ? ? ? In the Preface, I called the Blank Slate a sacred doctrine and human nature a modern taboo. This can now be stated as a technical hypothesis. The thrust of the radical science movement was to moralize the scientific study of the mind and to engage the mentality of taboo. Recall, from Part II, the indignant outrage, the punishment of heretics, the refusal to consider claims as they were actually stated, the moral cleansing through demonstrations and manifestos and public denunciations. Weizenbaum condemned ideas "whose very contemplation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust" and denounced the less-than-human scientists who "can even think of such a thing. " But of course it is the job of scholars to think about things, even if only to make it clear why they are wrong. Moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a collision course.
~
This ruthless dissection of the human moral sense does not mean that morality is a sham or that every moralist is a self- righteous prig. Moral psychology may be steeped in emotion, but then many philosophers have argued that morality cannot be grounded in reason alone anyway. As Hume wrote, " 'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. "17 The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, and guilt are the source of innumerable acts of kindness great and small, and a measured righteous anger and ethical certitude must have sustained great moral leaders throughout history.
Glover notes that many twentieth-century atrocities were set in motion when the moral emotions were disabled. Decent people were lulled into committing appalling acts by a variety of amoralizing causes, such as Utopian ideologies, phased decisions (in which the targets of bombing might shift from isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods themselves), and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy. It was often raw moral sentiment -- feeling empathy for victims, or asking oneself the moral-identity question "Am I the kind of person who could do this? " -- that {280} stopped people in mid-atrocity. The moral sense, amplified and extended by reasoning and a knowledge of history, is what stands between us and a Mad Max nightmare of ruthless psychopaths.
But there is still much to be wary of in human moralizing: the confusion of morality with status and purity, the temptation to overmoralize matters of judgment and thereby license aggression against those with whom we disagree, the taboos on thinking about unavoidable tradeoffs, and the ubiquitous vice of self-deception, which always manages to put the self on the side of the angels. Hitler was a moralist (indeed, a moral vegetarian) who, by most accounts, was convinced of the rectitude of his cause. As the historian Ian Buruma wrote, "This shows once again that true believers can be more dangerous than cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal; the former have to go to the end -- and drag the world down with them. "18
<< {281} >>
HOT BUTTONS
ome debates are so entwined with people's moral identity that one might despair that they can ever be resolved by reason and evidence. Social S psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are
intuitively certain they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social convention that one should always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don't change their minds but work harder to find a replacement argument. Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on the other side don't immediately
1
capitulate, it only proves they are impervious to reason.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the topics I will explore in this part of the book. People's opinions on politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts help define the kind of person they think they are and the kind of person they want to be. They prove that the person is opposed to oppression, violence, sexism, philistinism, and the abuse or neglect of children. Unfortunately, folded into these opinions are assumptions about the psychological makeup of Homo sapiens. Conscientious people may thus find themselves unwittingly staked to positions on empirical questions in biology or psychology. When scientific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they did, we would not have to do science in the first place. So when facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts and to clamp down on debate because the facts threaten everything they hold sacred. And this can leave us unequipped to deal with just those problems for which new facts and analyses are most needed.
The landscape of the sciences of human nature is strewn with these third rails, hot zones, black holes, and Chernobyls. I have picked five of them to explore in the next few chapters, while necessarily leaving out many others
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (for instance, race, sexual orientation, education, drug abuse, and mental illness). {282} Social psychologists have discovered that even in heated ideological battles, common ground can sometimes be found. 2 Each side must acknowledge that the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain values and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict. Finding such common ground is my goal in the discussions to follow.
? <<
{283} >> Chapter 16
Politics
I often think it's comical
How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That's born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative! 1
? ? ? ? ? Gilbert and Sullivan got it mostly right in 1882: liberal and conservative political attitudes are largely, though far from completely, heritable. When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar, with a correlation coefficient of . 62 (on a scale from -1 to +1). 2 Liberal and conservative attitudes are heritable not, of course, because attitudes are synthesized directly from DNA but because they come naturally to people with different temperaments. Conservatives, for example, tend to be more authoritarian, conscientious, traditional, and rule-bound. But whatever its immediate source, the heritability of political attitudes can explain some of the sparks that fly when liberals and conservatives meet. When it comes to attitudes that are heritable, people react more quickly and emotionally, are less likely to change their minds, and are more attracted to like-minded people. 3
Liberalism and conservatism have not just genetic roots, of course, but historical and intellectual ones. The two political philosophies were articulated in the eighteenth century in terms that would be familiar to readers of the editorial pages today, and their foundations can be traced back millennia to the political controversies of ancient Greece. During the past three centuries, many revolutions and uprisings were fought over these philosophies, as are the major elections in modern democracies.
This chapter is about the intellectual connections between the sciences of human nature and the political rift between right-wing and left-wing political {284} philosophies. The connection is not a secret. As philosophers have long noted, the two sides are not just political belief systems but empirical ones, rooted in different conceptions of human nature. Small wonder that the sciences of human nature have been so explosive. Evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and some parts of cognitive neuroscience are widely seen as falling on the political right, which in a modern university is about the worst thing you can say about something. No one can make sense of the controversies surrounding mind, brain, genes, and evolution without understanding their alignment with ancient political fault lines. E. O. Wilson learned this too late:
I had been blindsided by the attack [on Sociobiology]. Having expected some frontal fire from social scientists on primarily evidential grounds, I had received instead a political enfilade from the flank. A few observers were surprised that I was surprised. John Maynard Smith, a senior British evolutionary biologist and former Marxist, said that he disliked the last chapter of Sociobiology himself and "it was also absolutely obvious to me -- I cannot believe Wilson didn't know -- that this was going to provoke great hostility from American Marxists, and Marxists everywhere. " But it was true. . . . In 1975 I was a political naif: I knew almost nothing about Marxism as either a political belief or a mode of analysis, I had paid little attention to the dynamism of the activist left, and I had never heard of Science for the People. I was not even an intellectual in the European or New York-Cambridge sense. 4
As we shall see, the new sciences of human nature really do resonate with assumptions that historically were closer to the right than to the left. But today the alignments are not as predictable. The accusation that these sciences are irredeemably conservative comes from the Left Pole, the mythical place from which all directions are right. The political associations of a belief in human nature now crosscut the liberal-conservative dimension, and many political theorists invoke evolution and genetics to argue for policies on the left.
? ? ? ? ~
The sciences of human nature are pressing on two political hot buttons, not just one. The first is how we conceptualize the entity known as "society. " The political philosopher Roger Masters has shown how sociobiology (and related theories invoking evolution, genetics, and brain science) inadvertently took sides in an ancient dispute between two traditions of understanding the social order. 5
In the sociological tradition, a society is a cohesive organic entity and its individual citizens are mere parts. People are thought to be social by their very nature and to function as constituents of a larger superorganism. This is the tradition of Plato, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Kroeber, the sociologist {285} Talcott Parsons, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and postmodernism in the humanities and social sciences.
In the economic or social contract tradition, society is an arrangement negotiated by rational, self-interested individuals. Society emerges when people agree to sacrifice some of their autonomy in exchange for security from the depredations of others wielding their autonomy. It is the tradition of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, and of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and Bentham. In the twentieth century it became the basis for the rational actor or "economic man" models in economics and political science, and for cost-benefit analyses of public choices.
The modern theory of evolution falls smack into the social contract tradition. It maintains that complex adaptations, including behavioral strategies, evolved to benefit the individual (indeed, the genes for those traits within an individual), not the community, species, or ecosystem. 6 Social organization evolves when the long-term benefits to the individual outweigh the immediate costs. Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith, and many of his successors analyze the evolution of sociality using tools that come right out of economics, such as game theory and other optimization techniques.
Reciprocal altruism, in particular, is just the traditional concept of the social contract restated in biological terms. Of course, humans were never solitary (as Rousseau and Hobbes incorrectly surmised), and they did not inaugurate group living by haggling over a contract at a particular time and place. Bands, clans, tribes, and other social groups are central to human existence and have been so for as long as we have been a species. But the logic of social contracts may have propelled the evolution of the mental faculties that keep us in these groups. Social arrangements are evolutionarily contingent, arising when the benefits of group living exceed the costs. 7 With a slightly different ecosystem and evolutionary history, we could have ended up like our cousins the orangutans, who are almost entirely solitary. And according to evolutionary biology, all societies -- animal and human -- seethe with conflicts of interest and are held together by shifting mixtures of dominance and cooperation.
Throughout the book we have seen how the sciences of human nature have clashed with the sociological tradition. The social sciences were taken over by the doctrine that social facts live in their own universe, separate from the universe of individual minds. In Chapter 4 we saw an alternative conception in which cultures and societies arise from individual people pooling their discoveries and negotiating the tacit agreements that underlie social reality. We saw how a departure from the sociological paradigm was a major heresy of Wilson's Sociobiology, and that the primacy of society was a foundation of Marxism and played a role in its disdain for the interests of individual people. The division between the sociological and economic traditions is aligned {286} with the division between the political left and the political right, but only roughly. Marxism is obviously in the sociological tradition, and free- market conservatism is obviously in the economic tradition. In the liberal 1960s, Lyndon Johnson wanted to forge a Great Society, Pierre Trudeau a Just Society. In the conservative 1980s, Margaret Thatcher said, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. "
But as Masters points out, Durkheim and Parsons were in the sociological tradition, yet they were conservatives. One can easily see how conservative beliefs can favor the preservation of society as an entity and thereby downplay the desires of individuals. Conversely, Locke was in the social contract tradition, but he is a patron saint of liberalism, and Rousseau, who coined the expression "social contract," was an inspiration for liberal and revolutionary thinkers. Social contracts, like any contract, can become unfair to some of the signatories, and may have to be renegotiated progressively or redrawn from scratch in a revolution.
So the clash between the sociological and economic traditions can explain some of the heat ignited by the sciences of human nature, but it is not identical to the firefight between the political left and the political right. The rest of the chapter will scrutinize that second and hotter button.
~
The right-left axis aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that at first glance seem to have nothing in common. If you learn that someone is in favor of a strong military, for example, it is a good bet that the person is also in favor of judicial restraint rather than judicial activism. If someone believes in the importance of religion, chances are she will
? ? ? ? ? ? be tough on crime and in favor of lower taxes. Proponents of a laissez-faire economic policy tend to value patriotism and the family, and they are more likely to be old than young, pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian, gradualist than revolutionary, and in a business rather than a university or government agency. The opposing positions cluster just as reliably: if someone is sympathetic to rehabilitating offenders, or to affirmative action, or to generous welfare programs, or to a tolerance of homosexuality, chances are good that he will also be a pacifist, an environmentalist, an activist, an egalitarian, a secularist, and a professor or student.
Why on earth should people's beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about the size of the military? What does religion have to do with taxes? Whence the linkage between strict construction of the Constitution and disdain for shocking art? Before we can understand why beliefs about an innate human nature might cluster with liberal beliefs or with conservative beliefs, we have to understand why liberal beliefs cluster with other liberal beliefs and conservative beliefs cluster with other conservative beliefs.
The meanings of the words are of no help. Marxists in the Soviet Union {287} and its aftermath were called conservatives; Reagan and Thatcher were called revolutionaries. Liberals are liberal about sexual behavior but not about business practices; conservatives want to conserve communities and traditions, but they also favor the free market economy that subverts them. People who call themselves "classical liberals" are likely to be called "conservatives" by adherents of the version of leftism known as political correctness.
Nor can most contemporary liberals and conservatives articulate the cores of their belief systems. Liberals think that conservatives are just amoral plutocrats, and conservatives think that if you are not a liberal before you are twenty you have no heart but if you are a liberal after you are twenty you have no brain (attributed variously to Georges Clemenceau, Dean Inge, Benjamin Disraeli, and Maurice Maeterlinck). Strategic alliances -- such as the religious fundamentalists and free-market technocrats on the right, or the identity politicians and civil libertarians on the left -- may frustrate the search for any intellectual common denominator. Everyday political debates, such as whether tax rates should be exactly what they are or a few points higher or lower, are just as uninformative.
The most sweeping attempt to survey the underlying dimension is Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. 8 Not every ideological struggle fits his scheme, but as we say in social science, he has identified a factor that can account for a large proportion of the variance. Sowell explains two "visions" of the nature of human beings that were expressed in their purest forms by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the patron of secular conservatism, and William Godwin (1756- 1836), the British counterpart to Rousseau. In earlier times they might have been referred to as different visions of the perfectibility of man. Sowell calls them the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision; I will refer to them as the Tragic Vision (a term he uses in a later book) and the Utopian Vision. 9
In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. "Mortal things suit mortals best," wrote Pindar; "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made," wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.
In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why? '; I dream things that never were and ask 'why not? '" The quotation is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George {288} Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough"). 10 The Utopian Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin.
In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent, overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it. In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith remarked:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would react upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would, too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in
? ? ? ? ? general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren. 11
In the Tragic Vision, moreover, human nature has not changed. Traditions such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores, and political institutions are a distillation of time-tested techniques that let us work around the shortcomings of human nature. They are as applicable to humans today as they were when they developed, even if no one today can explain their rationale. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate enough to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up, because human {289} nature always leaves us teetering on the brink of barbarism. And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best we can hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted according to feedback about the sum of their good and bad consequences. It also follows that we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss. The best we can do is trade off one cost against another. In Burke's famous words, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution:
[One] should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father's life. 12
In the Utopian Vision, human nature changes with social circumstances, so traditional institutions have no inherent value. That was then, this is now. Traditions are the dead hand of the past, the attempt to rule from the grave. They must be stated explicitly so their rationale can be scrutinized and their moral status evaluated. And by that test, many traditions fail: the confinement of women to the home, the stigma against homosexuality and premarital sex, the superstitions of religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation, the dangers of patriotism as exemplified in the mindless slogan "My country, right or wrong. " Practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and patriarchy once seemed inevitable but have disappeared or faded from many parts of the world through changes in institutions that were once thought to be rooted in human nature. Moreover, the existence of suffering and injustice presents us with an undeniable moral imperative. We don't know what we can achieve until we try, and the alternative, resigning ourselves to these evils as the way of the world, is unconscionable. At Robert Kennedy's funeral, his brother Edward quoted from one of his recent speeches:
All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.
The future does not belong to those who are content with today, {290} apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.
Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live. 13
Those with the Tragic Vision are unmoved by ringing declarations attributed to the first-person plural we, our, and us. They are more likely to use the pronouns as the cartoon possum Pogo did: We have met the enemy, and he is us. We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when that power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. As the conservative philosopher Michael Oakshott wrote, "To try to do something which is
? ? ? ? ? inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise. "
The two kinds of visionaries thereby line up on opposite sides of many issues that would seem to have little in common. The Utopian Vision seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who would implement these policies -- namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic fiefdoms -- and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing their own interests. Thus, say the Tragic Visionaries, the Utopians fail to anticipate that welfare might encourage dependency, or that a restriction on one pollutant might force people to use another.
Instead, the Tragic Vision looks to systems that produce desirable outcomes even when no member of the system is particularly wise or virtuous. Market economies, in this vision, accomplish that goal: remember Smith's butcher, brewer, and baker providing us with dinner out of self-interest rather than benevolence. No mastermind has to understand the intricate flow of goods and services that make up an economy in order to anticipate who needs what, and when and where. Property rights give people an incentive to work and produce; contracts allow them to enjoy gains in trade. Prices convey information about scarcity and demand to producers and consumers, so they can {291} react by following a few simple rules -- make more of what is profitable, buy less of what is expensive -- and the "invisible hand" will do the rest. The intelligence of the system is distributed across millions of not-necessarily- intelligent producers and consumers, and cannot be articulated by anyone in particular.
People with the Utopian Vision point to market failures that can result from having a blind faith in free markets. They also call attention to the unjust distribution of wealth that tends to be produced by free markets. Opponents with the Tragic Vision argue that the notion of justice makes sense only when applied to human decisions within a framework of laws, not when applied to an abstraction called "society. " Friedrich Hayek wrote, "The manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people. " But that concern with social justice rests on a confusion, he claimed, because "the particulars of [a spontaneous order] cannot be just or unjust. "14
Some of today's battles between left and right fall directly out of these different philosophies: big versus small government, high versus low taxes, protectionism versus free trade, measures that aim to reduce undesirable outcomes (poverty, inequality, racial imbalance) versus measures that merely level the playing field and enforce the rules. Other battles follow in a less obvious way from the opposing visions of human potential. The Tragic Vision stresses fiduciary duties, even when the person executing them cannot see their immediate value, because they allow imperfect beings who cannot be sure of their virtue or foresight to participate in a tested system. The Utopian Vision stresses social responsibility, where people hold their actions to a higher ethical standard. In Lawrence Kohlberg's famous theory of moral development, a willingness to ignore rules in favor of abstract principles was literally identified as a "higher stage" (which, perhaps tellingly, most people never reach).
The most obvious example is the debate on strict constructionism and judicial restraint on one side and judicial activism in pursuit of social justice on the other. Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court from 1954 to 1969, was the prototypical judicial activist, who led the court to implement desegregation and expand the rights of the accused. He was known for interrupting lawyers in mid-argument by asking, "Is it right? Is it good? " The opposing view was stated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said his job was "to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not. " He conceded that "to improve conditions of life and the race is the main thing," and added, "But how the devil can I tell whether I am not pulling it down more in some other place? "15 Those with the Tragic Vision see judicial activism as an invitation to egotism and caprice and as unfair to those who have played by the rules as they were publicly stated. Those with the Utopian Vision see judicial restraint as the mindless preservation of arbitrary injustices -- as Dickens's {292} Mr. Bumble put it, "The law is an ass. "16 An infamous example is the Dred Scott decision of 1856, in which the Supreme Court ruled on narrow legalistic grounds that a freedslave could not sue to make his freedom official and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories.
Radical political reform, like radical judicial reform, will be more or less appealing depending on one's confidence in human intelligence and wisdom. In the Utopian Vision, solutions to social problems are readily available. Speaking in 1967 about the conditions that breed violence, Lyndon Johnson said, "All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. "17 If we already know the solutions, all we have to do is choose to implement them, and that requires only sincerity and dedication. By the same logic, anyone opposing the solutions must be motivated by blindness, dishonesty, and callousness. Those with the Tragic Vision say instead that solutions to social problems are elusive. The inherent conflicts of interest among people leave us with few options, all of them imperfect. Opponents of radical reform are showing a wise distrust of human hubris.
The political orientation of the universities is another manifestation of conflicting visions of human potential.
? ? ? ? ? ? Adherents of the Tragic Vision distrust knowledge stated in explicitly articulated and verbally justified propositions, which is the stock-in-trade of academics, pundits, and policy analysts. Instead they trust knowledge that is distributed diffusely throughout a system (such as a market economy or set of social mores) and which is tuned by adjustments by many simple agents using feedback from the world. (Cognitive scientists will be reminded of the distinction between symbolic representations and distributed neural networks, and that is no coincidence: Hayek, the foremost advocate of distributed intelligence in societies, was an early neural network modeler. )18 For much of the twentieth century, political conservatism had an anti-intellectual streak, until conservatives decided to play catch-up in the battle for hearts and minds and funded policy think tanks as a counterweight tc universities.
Finally, the disagreements on crime and war fall right out of the conflicting theories of human nature. Given the obvious waste and cruelty of war. those with the Utopian Vision see it as a kind of pathology that arises from misunderstandings, shortsightedness, and irrational passions. War is to be prevented by public expressions of pacifist sentiments, better communication between potential enemies, less saber-rattling rhetoric, fewer weapons and military alliances, a de-emphasis on patriotism, and negotiating to avert war at any cost. Adherents of the Tragic Vision, with their cynical view of human nature, see war as a rational and tempting strategy for people who think they can gain something for themselves or their nation. The calculations might be mistaken in any instance, and they may be morally deplorable because they give no weight to the suffering of the losers, but they are not literally pathological
{293} or irrational. On this view the only way to ensure peace is to raise the cost of war to potential aggressors by developing weaponry, arousing patriotism, rewarding bravery, flaunting one's might and resolve, and negotiating from strength to deter blackmail.
The same arguments divide the visions on crime. Those with the Utopian Vision see crime as inherently irrational and seek to prevent it by identifying the root causes. Those with the Tragic Vision see crime as inherently rational and believe that the root cause is all too obvious: people rob banks because that's where the money is. The most effective crime-prevention programs, they say, strike directly at the rational incentives. A high probability of unpleasant punishment raises the anticipated cost of crime. A public emphasis on personal responsibility helps enforce the incentives by closing any loopholes left open by the law. And strict parenting practices allow children to internalize these contingencies early in life. 19
~
And onto this battlefield strode an innocent E. O. Wilson. The ideas from evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. That vision was, after all, based on the Blank Slate (no permanent human nature), the Noble Savage (no selfish or evil instincts), and the Ghost in the Machine (an unfettered "we" that can choose better social arrangements). And here were scientists talking about selfish genes! And saying that adaptations are not for the good of the species but for the good of individuals and their kin (as if to vindicate Thatcher's claim that "there is no such thing as society"). That people scrimp on altruism because it is vulnerable to cheaters. That in pre-state societies men go to war even when they are well fed, because status and women are permanent Darwinian incentives. That the moral sense is riddled with biases, including a tendency to self-deception. And that conflicts of genetic interest are built in to social animals and leave us in a state of permanent tragedy. It looked as if the scientists were saying to proponents of the Tragic Vision: You're right, they're wrong.
The Utopians, particularly those in the radical science movement, replied that current findings on human intelligence and motivation are irrelevant. They can tell us only about what we have achieved in today's society, not what we might achieve in tomorrow's. Since we know that social arrangements can change if we decide to change them, any scientist who speaks of constraints on human nature must want oppression and injustice to continue.
My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. The sciences say nothing, of course, about differences in values that are associated with particular right-wing and left-wing positions (such as in the tradeoffs between {294} unemployment and environmental protection, diversity and economic efficiency, or individual freedom and community cohesion). Nor do they speak directly to policies that are based on a complex mixture of assumptions about the world.
advertising to children ? automobile safety ? Barbie dolls ? "big box" chain stores ? cheesecake photos ? clothing from Third World factories ? consumer product safety ? corporate-owned farms ? defense- funded research ? disposable diapers ? disposable packaging ? ethnic jokes ? executive salaries ? fast food ? flirtation in the workplace ? food additives ? fur ? hydroelectric dams ? IQ tests ? logging ? mining ? nuclear power ? oil drilling ? owning certain stocks ? poultry farms ? public holidays (Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day) ? research on AIDS ? research on breast cancer ? spanking ? suburbia ("sprawl") ? sugar ? tax cuts ? toy guns ? violence on television ? weight of fashion models
Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste. Pollution, for example, is often treated as a crime of defiling the sacred, as in the song by the rock group Traffic: "Why don't we . . . try to save this land, and make a promise not to hurt again this holy ground. " This can be contrasted with the attitude of economists like Robert Frank, who (alluding to the costs of cleanups) said, "There is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. " Moreover, all human activities have consequences, often with various degrees of benefit and harm to different
parties, but not all of them are conceived as immoral. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms, takes his family on a driving vacation (multiplying their risk of accidental death), or moves to a rural area (increasing pollution {277} and fuel use in commuting and shopping). Driving a gas-guzzling SUV is seen as morally dubious, but driving a gas-guzzling Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is suspect, but eating imported cheese or tiramisu is not. Becoming aware of the psychology of moralization need not make us morally obtuse. On the contrary, it can alert us to the possibility that a decision to treat an act in terms of virtue and sin as opposed to cost and benefit has been made on morally irrelevant grounds -- in particular, whether the saints and sinners would be in one's own coalition or someone else's. Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
~
? ? There is another bit of moral psychology that is commonly associated with primitive thinking but is alive and well in
modern minds: concepts of the sacred and the taboo. Some values are considered not just worthy but sacrosanct. They have infinite or transcendental worth, trumping all other considerations. One is not permitted even to think of trading them off against other values, because the very thought is self-evidently sinful and deserves only condemnation and outrage.
The psychologist Philip Tetlock elicited the psychology of the sacred and the taboo in the students of American universities. 14 He asked them whether people should be allowed to buy and sell organs for transplantation, auction licenses to adopt orphans, pay for the right to become a citizen, sell their vote in an election, or pay someone to serve in their stead in prison or the military. Not surprisingly, most of the students thought that the practices were unethical and should be outlawed. But their responses went well beyond disagreement: they were outraged that anyone would consider legalizing these practices, were insulted to have been asked, and wanted to punish anyone who tolerated them. When they were asked to justify their opinion, all they could say was that the practices were "degrading, dehumanizing, and unacceptable. " The students even sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering to campaign against a (fictitious) movement to legalize the auctioning of adoption rights. Their outrage was reduced a bit, but was still potent, after hearing arguments in favor of the taboo policies, such as that a market in orphans would put more children in loving homes and that lower-income people would be given vouchers to participate.
Another study asked about a hospital administrator who had to decide whether to spend a million dollars on a liver transplant for a child or use it on other hospital needs. (Administrators implicitly face this kind of choice all the time, because there are lifesaving procedures that are astronomically expensive and cannot be carried out on everyone who needs them. ) Not only did respondents want to punish an administrator who chose to spend the money on {278} the hospital, they wanted to punish an administrator who chose to save the child but thought for a long time before making the decision (like the frugal comedian Jack Benny when a mugger said, "Your money or your life").
The taboo on thinking about core values is not totally irrational. We judge people not just on what they do but on what they are -- not just on whether someone has given more than he has taken, but on whether he is the kind of person who would sell you down the river or knife you in the back if it were ever in his interests to do so. To determine whether someone is emotionally committed to a relationship, guaranteeing the veracity of his promises, one should ascertain how he thinks: whether he holds your interests sacred or constantly weighs them against the profits to be made by selling you out. The notion of character joins the moral picture, and with it the notion of moral identity: the concept of one's own character that is maintained internally and projected to others.
Tetlock points out that it is in the very nature of our commitments to other people to deny that we can put a price on them: "To transgress these normative boundaries, to attach a monetary value to one's friendships or one's children or one's loyalty to one's country, is to disqualify oneself from certain societal roles, to demonstrate that one just 'doesn't get it' -- one does not understand what it means to be a true friend or parent or citizen. "15 Taboo tradeoffs, which pit a sacred value against a secular one (such as money), are "morally corrosive: the longer one contemplates indecent proposals, the more irreparably one compromises one's moral identity. "16
Unfortunately, a psychology that treats some desiderata as having infinite value can lead to absurdities. Tetlock reviews some examples. The Delaney Clause of the Food and Drug Act of 1958 sought to improve public health by banning all new food additives for which there was any risk of carcinogenicity. That sounded good but wasn't. The policy left people exposed to more dangerous food additives that were already on the market, it created an incentive for manufacturers to introduce new dangerous additives as long as they were not carcinogenic, and it outlawed products that could have saved more lives than they put at risk, such as the saccharin used by diabetics. Similarly after the discovery of hazardous waste at the Love Canal in 1978, Congress passed the Superfund Act, which required the complete cleanup of all hazardous waste sites. It turned out to cost millions of dollars to clean up the last 10 percent of the waste at a given site -- money that could have been spent on cleaning up other sites or reducing other health risks. So the lavish fund went bankrupt before even a fraction of its sites could be decontaminated, and its effect on Americans' health was debatable. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, four-fifths of the respondents in one poll said that the country should pursue greater environmental protection "regardless of cost. " Taken literally, that meant they were prepared to shut down all schools, hospitals, and police and {279} fire stations, stop funding social programs, medical research, foreign aid, and national defense, or raise the income tax rate to 99 percent, if that is what it would have cost to protect the environment.
Tetlock observes that these fiascoes came about because any politician who honestly presented the inexorable tradeoffs would be crucified for violating a taboo. He would be guilty of "tolerating poisons in our food and water," or worse, "putting a dollar value on human life. " Policy analysts note that we are stuck with wasteful and inegalitarian entitlement programs because any politician who tried to reform them would be committing political suicide. Savvy opponents would frame the reform in the language of taboo: "breaking our faith with the elderly," "betraying the sacred trust of veterans who risked their lives for their country," "scrimping on the care and education of the young. "
? ? ? ? ? In the Preface, I called the Blank Slate a sacred doctrine and human nature a modern taboo. This can now be stated as a technical hypothesis. The thrust of the radical science movement was to moralize the scientific study of the mind and to engage the mentality of taboo. Recall, from Part II, the indignant outrage, the punishment of heretics, the refusal to consider claims as they were actually stated, the moral cleansing through demonstrations and manifestos and public denunciations. Weizenbaum condemned ideas "whose very contemplation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust" and denounced the less-than-human scientists who "can even think of such a thing. " But of course it is the job of scholars to think about things, even if only to make it clear why they are wrong. Moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a collision course.
~
This ruthless dissection of the human moral sense does not mean that morality is a sham or that every moralist is a self- righteous prig. Moral psychology may be steeped in emotion, but then many philosophers have argued that morality cannot be grounded in reason alone anyway. As Hume wrote, " 'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. "17 The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, and guilt are the source of innumerable acts of kindness great and small, and a measured righteous anger and ethical certitude must have sustained great moral leaders throughout history.
Glover notes that many twentieth-century atrocities were set in motion when the moral emotions were disabled. Decent people were lulled into committing appalling acts by a variety of amoralizing causes, such as Utopian ideologies, phased decisions (in which the targets of bombing might shift from isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods themselves), and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy. It was often raw moral sentiment -- feeling empathy for victims, or asking oneself the moral-identity question "Am I the kind of person who could do this? " -- that {280} stopped people in mid-atrocity. The moral sense, amplified and extended by reasoning and a knowledge of history, is what stands between us and a Mad Max nightmare of ruthless psychopaths.
But there is still much to be wary of in human moralizing: the confusion of morality with status and purity, the temptation to overmoralize matters of judgment and thereby license aggression against those with whom we disagree, the taboos on thinking about unavoidable tradeoffs, and the ubiquitous vice of self-deception, which always manages to put the self on the side of the angels. Hitler was a moralist (indeed, a moral vegetarian) who, by most accounts, was convinced of the rectitude of his cause. As the historian Ian Buruma wrote, "This shows once again that true believers can be more dangerous than cynical operators. The latter might cut a deal; the former have to go to the end -- and drag the world down with them. "18
<< {281} >>
HOT BUTTONS
ome debates are so entwined with people's moral identity that one might despair that they can ever be resolved by reason and evidence. Social S psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are
intuitively certain they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social convention that one should always provide reasons for one's opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don't change their minds but work harder to find a replacement argument. Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on the other side don't immediately
1
capitulate, it only proves they are impervious to reason.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the topics I will explore in this part of the book. People's opinions on politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts help define the kind of person they think they are and the kind of person they want to be. They prove that the person is opposed to oppression, violence, sexism, philistinism, and the abuse or neglect of children. Unfortunately, folded into these opinions are assumptions about the psychological makeup of Homo sapiens. Conscientious people may thus find themselves unwittingly staked to positions on empirical questions in biology or psychology. When scientific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they did, we would not have to do science in the first place. So when facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts and to clamp down on debate because the facts threaten everything they hold sacred. And this can leave us unequipped to deal with just those problems for which new facts and analyses are most needed.
The landscape of the sciences of human nature is strewn with these third rails, hot zones, black holes, and Chernobyls. I have picked five of them to explore in the next few chapters, while necessarily leaving out many others
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (for instance, race, sexual orientation, education, drug abuse, and mental illness). {282} Social psychologists have discovered that even in heated ideological battles, common ground can sometimes be found. 2 Each side must acknowledge that the other is arguing out of principle, too, and that they both share certain values and disagree only over which to emphasize in cases where they conflict. Finding such common ground is my goal in the discussions to follow.
? <<
{283} >> Chapter 16
Politics
I often think it's comical
How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal, That's born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative! 1
? ? ? ? ? Gilbert and Sullivan got it mostly right in 1882: liberal and conservative political attitudes are largely, though far from completely, heritable. When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar, with a correlation coefficient of . 62 (on a scale from -1 to +1). 2 Liberal and conservative attitudes are heritable not, of course, because attitudes are synthesized directly from DNA but because they come naturally to people with different temperaments. Conservatives, for example, tend to be more authoritarian, conscientious, traditional, and rule-bound. But whatever its immediate source, the heritability of political attitudes can explain some of the sparks that fly when liberals and conservatives meet. When it comes to attitudes that are heritable, people react more quickly and emotionally, are less likely to change their minds, and are more attracted to like-minded people. 3
Liberalism and conservatism have not just genetic roots, of course, but historical and intellectual ones. The two political philosophies were articulated in the eighteenth century in terms that would be familiar to readers of the editorial pages today, and their foundations can be traced back millennia to the political controversies of ancient Greece. During the past three centuries, many revolutions and uprisings were fought over these philosophies, as are the major elections in modern democracies.
This chapter is about the intellectual connections between the sciences of human nature and the political rift between right-wing and left-wing political {284} philosophies. The connection is not a secret. As philosophers have long noted, the two sides are not just political belief systems but empirical ones, rooted in different conceptions of human nature. Small wonder that the sciences of human nature have been so explosive. Evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and some parts of cognitive neuroscience are widely seen as falling on the political right, which in a modern university is about the worst thing you can say about something. No one can make sense of the controversies surrounding mind, brain, genes, and evolution without understanding their alignment with ancient political fault lines. E. O. Wilson learned this too late:
I had been blindsided by the attack [on Sociobiology]. Having expected some frontal fire from social scientists on primarily evidential grounds, I had received instead a political enfilade from the flank. A few observers were surprised that I was surprised. John Maynard Smith, a senior British evolutionary biologist and former Marxist, said that he disliked the last chapter of Sociobiology himself and "it was also absolutely obvious to me -- I cannot believe Wilson didn't know -- that this was going to provoke great hostility from American Marxists, and Marxists everywhere. " But it was true. . . . In 1975 I was a political naif: I knew almost nothing about Marxism as either a political belief or a mode of analysis, I had paid little attention to the dynamism of the activist left, and I had never heard of Science for the People. I was not even an intellectual in the European or New York-Cambridge sense. 4
As we shall see, the new sciences of human nature really do resonate with assumptions that historically were closer to the right than to the left. But today the alignments are not as predictable. The accusation that these sciences are irredeemably conservative comes from the Left Pole, the mythical place from which all directions are right. The political associations of a belief in human nature now crosscut the liberal-conservative dimension, and many political theorists invoke evolution and genetics to argue for policies on the left.
? ? ? ? ~
The sciences of human nature are pressing on two political hot buttons, not just one. The first is how we conceptualize the entity known as "society. " The political philosopher Roger Masters has shown how sociobiology (and related theories invoking evolution, genetics, and brain science) inadvertently took sides in an ancient dispute between two traditions of understanding the social order. 5
In the sociological tradition, a society is a cohesive organic entity and its individual citizens are mere parts. People are thought to be social by their very nature and to function as constituents of a larger superorganism. This is the tradition of Plato, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Kroeber, the sociologist {285} Talcott Parsons, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and postmodernism in the humanities and social sciences.
In the economic or social contract tradition, society is an arrangement negotiated by rational, self-interested individuals. Society emerges when people agree to sacrifice some of their autonomy in exchange for security from the depredations of others wielding their autonomy. It is the tradition of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, and of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and Bentham. In the twentieth century it became the basis for the rational actor or "economic man" models in economics and political science, and for cost-benefit analyses of public choices.
The modern theory of evolution falls smack into the social contract tradition. It maintains that complex adaptations, including behavioral strategies, evolved to benefit the individual (indeed, the genes for those traits within an individual), not the community, species, or ecosystem. 6 Social organization evolves when the long-term benefits to the individual outweigh the immediate costs. Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith, and many of his successors analyze the evolution of sociality using tools that come right out of economics, such as game theory and other optimization techniques.
Reciprocal altruism, in particular, is just the traditional concept of the social contract restated in biological terms. Of course, humans were never solitary (as Rousseau and Hobbes incorrectly surmised), and they did not inaugurate group living by haggling over a contract at a particular time and place. Bands, clans, tribes, and other social groups are central to human existence and have been so for as long as we have been a species. But the logic of social contracts may have propelled the evolution of the mental faculties that keep us in these groups. Social arrangements are evolutionarily contingent, arising when the benefits of group living exceed the costs. 7 With a slightly different ecosystem and evolutionary history, we could have ended up like our cousins the orangutans, who are almost entirely solitary. And according to evolutionary biology, all societies -- animal and human -- seethe with conflicts of interest and are held together by shifting mixtures of dominance and cooperation.
Throughout the book we have seen how the sciences of human nature have clashed with the sociological tradition. The social sciences were taken over by the doctrine that social facts live in their own universe, separate from the universe of individual minds. In Chapter 4 we saw an alternative conception in which cultures and societies arise from individual people pooling their discoveries and negotiating the tacit agreements that underlie social reality. We saw how a departure from the sociological paradigm was a major heresy of Wilson's Sociobiology, and that the primacy of society was a foundation of Marxism and played a role in its disdain for the interests of individual people. The division between the sociological and economic traditions is aligned {286} with the division between the political left and the political right, but only roughly. Marxism is obviously in the sociological tradition, and free- market conservatism is obviously in the economic tradition. In the liberal 1960s, Lyndon Johnson wanted to forge a Great Society, Pierre Trudeau a Just Society. In the conservative 1980s, Margaret Thatcher said, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. "
But as Masters points out, Durkheim and Parsons were in the sociological tradition, yet they were conservatives. One can easily see how conservative beliefs can favor the preservation of society as an entity and thereby downplay the desires of individuals. Conversely, Locke was in the social contract tradition, but he is a patron saint of liberalism, and Rousseau, who coined the expression "social contract," was an inspiration for liberal and revolutionary thinkers. Social contracts, like any contract, can become unfair to some of the signatories, and may have to be renegotiated progressively or redrawn from scratch in a revolution.
So the clash between the sociological and economic traditions can explain some of the heat ignited by the sciences of human nature, but it is not identical to the firefight between the political left and the political right. The rest of the chapter will scrutinize that second and hotter button.
~
The right-left axis aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that at first glance seem to have nothing in common. If you learn that someone is in favor of a strong military, for example, it is a good bet that the person is also in favor of judicial restraint rather than judicial activism. If someone believes in the importance of religion, chances are she will
? ? ? ? ? ? be tough on crime and in favor of lower taxes. Proponents of a laissez-faire economic policy tend to value patriotism and the family, and they are more likely to be old than young, pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian, gradualist than revolutionary, and in a business rather than a university or government agency. The opposing positions cluster just as reliably: if someone is sympathetic to rehabilitating offenders, or to affirmative action, or to generous welfare programs, or to a tolerance of homosexuality, chances are good that he will also be a pacifist, an environmentalist, an activist, an egalitarian, a secularist, and a professor or student.
Why on earth should people's beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about the size of the military? What does religion have to do with taxes? Whence the linkage between strict construction of the Constitution and disdain for shocking art? Before we can understand why beliefs about an innate human nature might cluster with liberal beliefs or with conservative beliefs, we have to understand why liberal beliefs cluster with other liberal beliefs and conservative beliefs cluster with other conservative beliefs.
The meanings of the words are of no help. Marxists in the Soviet Union {287} and its aftermath were called conservatives; Reagan and Thatcher were called revolutionaries. Liberals are liberal about sexual behavior but not about business practices; conservatives want to conserve communities and traditions, but they also favor the free market economy that subverts them. People who call themselves "classical liberals" are likely to be called "conservatives" by adherents of the version of leftism known as political correctness.
Nor can most contemporary liberals and conservatives articulate the cores of their belief systems. Liberals think that conservatives are just amoral plutocrats, and conservatives think that if you are not a liberal before you are twenty you have no heart but if you are a liberal after you are twenty you have no brain (attributed variously to Georges Clemenceau, Dean Inge, Benjamin Disraeli, and Maurice Maeterlinck). Strategic alliances -- such as the religious fundamentalists and free-market technocrats on the right, or the identity politicians and civil libertarians on the left -- may frustrate the search for any intellectual common denominator. Everyday political debates, such as whether tax rates should be exactly what they are or a few points higher or lower, are just as uninformative.
The most sweeping attempt to survey the underlying dimension is Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. 8 Not every ideological struggle fits his scheme, but as we say in social science, he has identified a factor that can account for a large proportion of the variance. Sowell explains two "visions" of the nature of human beings that were expressed in their purest forms by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the patron of secular conservatism, and William Godwin (1756- 1836), the British counterpart to Rousseau. In earlier times they might have been referred to as different visions of the perfectibility of man. Sowell calls them the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision; I will refer to them as the Tragic Vision (a term he uses in a later book) and the Utopian Vision. 9
In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. "Mortal things suit mortals best," wrote Pindar; "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made," wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.
In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why? '; I dream things that never were and ask 'why not? '" The quotation is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George {288} Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough"). 10 The Utopian Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin.
In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent, overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it. In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith remarked:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would react upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would, too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in
? ? ? ? ? general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren. 11
In the Tragic Vision, moreover, human nature has not changed. Traditions such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores, and political institutions are a distillation of time-tested techniques that let us work around the shortcomings of human nature. They are as applicable to humans today as they were when they developed, even if no one today can explain their rationale. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate enough to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up, because human {289} nature always leaves us teetering on the brink of barbarism. And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best we can hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted according to feedback about the sum of their good and bad consequences. It also follows that we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss. The best we can do is trade off one cost against another. In Burke's famous words, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution:
[One] should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father's life. 12
In the Utopian Vision, human nature changes with social circumstances, so traditional institutions have no inherent value. That was then, this is now. Traditions are the dead hand of the past, the attempt to rule from the grave. They must be stated explicitly so their rationale can be scrutinized and their moral status evaluated. And by that test, many traditions fail: the confinement of women to the home, the stigma against homosexuality and premarital sex, the superstitions of religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation, the dangers of patriotism as exemplified in the mindless slogan "My country, right or wrong. " Practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and patriarchy once seemed inevitable but have disappeared or faded from many parts of the world through changes in institutions that were once thought to be rooted in human nature. Moreover, the existence of suffering and injustice presents us with an undeniable moral imperative. We don't know what we can achieve until we try, and the alternative, resigning ourselves to these evils as the way of the world, is unconscionable. At Robert Kennedy's funeral, his brother Edward quoted from one of his recent speeches:
All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.
The future does not belong to those who are content with today, {290} apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.
Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live. 13
Those with the Tragic Vision are unmoved by ringing declarations attributed to the first-person plural we, our, and us. They are more likely to use the pronouns as the cartoon possum Pogo did: We have met the enemy, and he is us. We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when that power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. As the conservative philosopher Michael Oakshott wrote, "To try to do something which is
? ? ? ? ? inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise. "
The two kinds of visionaries thereby line up on opposite sides of many issues that would seem to have little in common. The Utopian Vision seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who would implement these policies -- namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic fiefdoms -- and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing their own interests. Thus, say the Tragic Visionaries, the Utopians fail to anticipate that welfare might encourage dependency, or that a restriction on one pollutant might force people to use another.
Instead, the Tragic Vision looks to systems that produce desirable outcomes even when no member of the system is particularly wise or virtuous. Market economies, in this vision, accomplish that goal: remember Smith's butcher, brewer, and baker providing us with dinner out of self-interest rather than benevolence. No mastermind has to understand the intricate flow of goods and services that make up an economy in order to anticipate who needs what, and when and where. Property rights give people an incentive to work and produce; contracts allow them to enjoy gains in trade. Prices convey information about scarcity and demand to producers and consumers, so they can {291} react by following a few simple rules -- make more of what is profitable, buy less of what is expensive -- and the "invisible hand" will do the rest. The intelligence of the system is distributed across millions of not-necessarily- intelligent producers and consumers, and cannot be articulated by anyone in particular.
People with the Utopian Vision point to market failures that can result from having a blind faith in free markets. They also call attention to the unjust distribution of wealth that tends to be produced by free markets. Opponents with the Tragic Vision argue that the notion of justice makes sense only when applied to human decisions within a framework of laws, not when applied to an abstraction called "society. " Friedrich Hayek wrote, "The manner in which the benefits and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people. " But that concern with social justice rests on a confusion, he claimed, because "the particulars of [a spontaneous order] cannot be just or unjust. "14
Some of today's battles between left and right fall directly out of these different philosophies: big versus small government, high versus low taxes, protectionism versus free trade, measures that aim to reduce undesirable outcomes (poverty, inequality, racial imbalance) versus measures that merely level the playing field and enforce the rules. Other battles follow in a less obvious way from the opposing visions of human potential. The Tragic Vision stresses fiduciary duties, even when the person executing them cannot see their immediate value, because they allow imperfect beings who cannot be sure of their virtue or foresight to participate in a tested system. The Utopian Vision stresses social responsibility, where people hold their actions to a higher ethical standard. In Lawrence Kohlberg's famous theory of moral development, a willingness to ignore rules in favor of abstract principles was literally identified as a "higher stage" (which, perhaps tellingly, most people never reach).
The most obvious example is the debate on strict constructionism and judicial restraint on one side and judicial activism in pursuit of social justice on the other. Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court from 1954 to 1969, was the prototypical judicial activist, who led the court to implement desegregation and expand the rights of the accused. He was known for interrupting lawyers in mid-argument by asking, "Is it right? Is it good? " The opposing view was stated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said his job was "to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not. " He conceded that "to improve conditions of life and the race is the main thing," and added, "But how the devil can I tell whether I am not pulling it down more in some other place? "15 Those with the Tragic Vision see judicial activism as an invitation to egotism and caprice and as unfair to those who have played by the rules as they were publicly stated. Those with the Utopian Vision see judicial restraint as the mindless preservation of arbitrary injustices -- as Dickens's {292} Mr. Bumble put it, "The law is an ass. "16 An infamous example is the Dred Scott decision of 1856, in which the Supreme Court ruled on narrow legalistic grounds that a freedslave could not sue to make his freedom official and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories.
Radical political reform, like radical judicial reform, will be more or less appealing depending on one's confidence in human intelligence and wisdom. In the Utopian Vision, solutions to social problems are readily available. Speaking in 1967 about the conditions that breed violence, Lyndon Johnson said, "All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. "17 If we already know the solutions, all we have to do is choose to implement them, and that requires only sincerity and dedication. By the same logic, anyone opposing the solutions must be motivated by blindness, dishonesty, and callousness. Those with the Tragic Vision say instead that solutions to social problems are elusive. The inherent conflicts of interest among people leave us with few options, all of them imperfect. Opponents of radical reform are showing a wise distrust of human hubris.
The political orientation of the universities is another manifestation of conflicting visions of human potential.
? ? ? ? ? ? Adherents of the Tragic Vision distrust knowledge stated in explicitly articulated and verbally justified propositions, which is the stock-in-trade of academics, pundits, and policy analysts. Instead they trust knowledge that is distributed diffusely throughout a system (such as a market economy or set of social mores) and which is tuned by adjustments by many simple agents using feedback from the world. (Cognitive scientists will be reminded of the distinction between symbolic representations and distributed neural networks, and that is no coincidence: Hayek, the foremost advocate of distributed intelligence in societies, was an early neural network modeler. )18 For much of the twentieth century, political conservatism had an anti-intellectual streak, until conservatives decided to play catch-up in the battle for hearts and minds and funded policy think tanks as a counterweight tc universities.
Finally, the disagreements on crime and war fall right out of the conflicting theories of human nature. Given the obvious waste and cruelty of war. those with the Utopian Vision see it as a kind of pathology that arises from misunderstandings, shortsightedness, and irrational passions. War is to be prevented by public expressions of pacifist sentiments, better communication between potential enemies, less saber-rattling rhetoric, fewer weapons and military alliances, a de-emphasis on patriotism, and negotiating to avert war at any cost. Adherents of the Tragic Vision, with their cynical view of human nature, see war as a rational and tempting strategy for people who think they can gain something for themselves or their nation. The calculations might be mistaken in any instance, and they may be morally deplorable because they give no weight to the suffering of the losers, but they are not literally pathological
{293} or irrational. On this view the only way to ensure peace is to raise the cost of war to potential aggressors by developing weaponry, arousing patriotism, rewarding bravery, flaunting one's might and resolve, and negotiating from strength to deter blackmail.
The same arguments divide the visions on crime. Those with the Utopian Vision see crime as inherently irrational and seek to prevent it by identifying the root causes. Those with the Tragic Vision see crime as inherently rational and believe that the root cause is all too obvious: people rob banks because that's where the money is. The most effective crime-prevention programs, they say, strike directly at the rational incentives. A high probability of unpleasant punishment raises the anticipated cost of crime. A public emphasis on personal responsibility helps enforce the incentives by closing any loopholes left open by the law. And strict parenting practices allow children to internalize these contingencies early in life. 19
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And onto this battlefield strode an innocent E. O. Wilson. The ideas from evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. That vision was, after all, based on the Blank Slate (no permanent human nature), the Noble Savage (no selfish or evil instincts), and the Ghost in the Machine (an unfettered "we" that can choose better social arrangements). And here were scientists talking about selfish genes! And saying that adaptations are not for the good of the species but for the good of individuals and their kin (as if to vindicate Thatcher's claim that "there is no such thing as society"). That people scrimp on altruism because it is vulnerable to cheaters. That in pre-state societies men go to war even when they are well fed, because status and women are permanent Darwinian incentives. That the moral sense is riddled with biases, including a tendency to self-deception. And that conflicts of genetic interest are built in to social animals and leave us in a state of permanent tragedy. It looked as if the scientists were saying to proponents of the Tragic Vision: You're right, they're wrong.
The Utopians, particularly those in the radical science movement, replied that current findings on human intelligence and motivation are irrelevant. They can tell us only about what we have achieved in today's society, not what we might achieve in tomorrow's. Since we know that social arrangements can change if we decide to change them, any scientist who speaks of constraints on human nature must want oppression and injustice to continue.
My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. The sciences say nothing, of course, about differences in values that are associated with particular right-wing and left-wing positions (such as in the tradeoffs between {294} unemployment and environmental protection, diversity and economic efficiency, or individual freedom and community cohesion). Nor do they speak directly to policies that are based on a complex mixture of assumptions about the world.
