No More Learning

)
Discrimination -- in the sense of using a statistically predictive trait of an individual's group to make a decision about the individual -- is not always {148} immoral, or at least we don't always treat it as immoral. To predict someone's behavior perfectly we would need an X-ray machine for the soul. Even predicting someone's behavior with the tools we do have -- such as tests, interviews, background checks, and recommendations -- would require unlimited resources if we were to use them to the fullest. Decisions that have to be made with finite time and resources, and which have high costs for certain kinds of errors, must use some trait as a basis for judging a person. And that necessarily judges the person according to a stereotype.
In some cases the overlap between two groups is so small that we feel comfortable discriminating against one of the groups absolutely. For example, no one objects to keeping chimpanzees out of our schools, even though it is conceivable that if we tested every chimp on the planet we might find one that could learn to read and write. We apply a speciesist stereotype that chimps cannot profit from a human education, figuring that the odds of finding an exception do not outweigh the costs of examining every last one.
In more realistic circumstances we have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the discrimination is justifiable. Denying driving and voting rights to young teenagers is a form of age discrimination that is unfair to responsible teens. But we are not willing to pay either the financial costs of developing a test for psychological maturity or the moral costs of classification errors, such as teens wrapping their cars around trees. Almost everyone is appalled by racial profiling -- pulling over motorists for "driving while black. " But after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, about half of Americans polled said they were not opposed to ethnic profiling -- scrutinizing passengers for "flying while Arab. "16 People who distinguish the two must reason that the benefits of catching a marijuana dealer do not outweigh the harm done to innocent black drivers, but the benefits of stopping a suicide hijacker do outweigh the harm done to innocent Arab passengers. Cost-benefit analyses are also sometimes used to justify racial preferences: the benefits of racially diverse workplaces and campuses are thought to outweigh the costs of discriminating against whites.
The possibility that men and women are not the same in all respects also presents policymakers with choices. It would be reprehensible for a bank to hire a man over a woman as a manager for the reason that he is less likely to quit after having a child. Would it also be reprehensible for a couple to hire a woman over a man as a nanny for their daughter because she is less likely to sexually abuse the child? Most people believe that the punishment for a given crime should be the same regardless of who commits it. But knowing the typical sexual emotions of the two sexes, should we apply the same punishment to a man who seduces a sixteen-year-old girl and to a woman who seduces a sixteen-year-old boy?
These are some of the issues that face the people of a democracy in {149} deciding what to do about discrimination. The point is not that group differences may never be used as a basis for discrimination. The point is that they do not havetobeusedthatway,andsometimeswecandecideon~moralgroundsthattheymustnotbeusedthatway.
The Blank Slate, then, is not necessary to combat racism and sexism. Nor is it necessary to combat Social Darwinism, the belief that the rich and the poor deserve their status and so we must abandon any principle of economic justice in favor of extreme laissez-faire policies.
Because of a fear of Social Darwinism, the idea that class has anything to do with genes is treated by modern intellectuals like plutonium, even though it is hard to imagine how it could not be true in part. To adapt an example from the philosopher Robert Nozick, suppose a million people are willing to pay ten dollars to hear Pavarotti sing and
? ? ? ? are unwilling to pay ten dollars to hear me sing, in part because of genetic differences between us. Pavarotti will be ten million dollars richer and will live in an economic stratum that my genes keep me out of, even in a society that is totally fair. 17 It is a brute fact that greater rewards will go to people with greater inborn talent if other people are willing to pay more for the fruits of those talents. The only way that cannot happen is if people are locked into arbitrary castes, if all economic transactions are controlled by the state, or if there is no such thing as inborn talent because we are blank slates.
A surprising number of intellectuals, particularly on the left, do deny that there is such a thing as inborn talent, especially intelligence. Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 bestseller The Mismeasure of Man was written to debunk "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups -- races, classes, or sexes -- are innately inferior and deserve their status. "18 The philosopher Hilary Putnam argued that the concept of intelligence is part of a social theory called "elitism" that is specific to capitalist societies:
Under a less competitive form of social organization, the theory of elitism might well be replaced by a different theory -- the theory of egalitarianism. This theory might say that ordinary people can do anything that is in their interest and do it well when (1) they are highly motivated, and (2) they work collectively. 19
In other words, any of us could become a Richard Feynman or a Tiger Woods if only we were highly enough motivated and worked collectively.
I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in {150} considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64, removing lead paint that lowers a child's IQ by five points, or the presidential qualifications of George W. Bush. In any case, there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variation in life outcomes such as income and social status. 20
The existence of inborn talents, however, does not call for Social Darwinism. The anxiety that one must lead to the other is based on two fallacies. The first is an all-or-none mentality that often infects discussions of the social implications of genetics. The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor. The other ones include sheer luck, inherited wealth, race and class prejudice, unequal opportunity (such as in schooling and connections), and cultural capital: habits and values that promote economic success. Acknowledging that talent matters doesn't mean that prejudice and unequal opportunity do not matter.
But more important, even if inherited talents can lead to socioeconomic success, it doesn't mean that the success is deserved in a moral sense. Social Darwinism is based on Spencer's assumption that we can look to evolution to discover what is right -- that "good" can be boiled down to "evolutionarily successful. " This lives in infamy as a reference case for the "naturalistic fallacy": the belief that what happens in nature is good. (Spencer also confused people's social success -- their wealth, power, and status -- with their evolutionary success, the number of their viable descendants. ) The naturalistic fallacy was named by the moral philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 Principia Ethica, the book that killed Spencer's ethics. 21 Moore applied "Hume's Guillotine," the argument that no matter how convincingly you show that something is true, it never follows logically that it ought to be true. Moore noted that it is sensible to ask, "This conduct is more evolutionarily successful, but is it good? " The mere fact that the question makes sense shows that evolutionary success and goodness are not the same thing.
Can one really reconcile biological differences with a concept of social justice? Absolutely. In his famous theory of justice, the philosopher John Rawls asks us to imagine a social contract drawn up by self-interested agents negotiating under a veil of ignorance, unaware of the talents or status they will inherit at birth -- ghosts ignorant of the machines they will haunt. He argues that a just society is one that these disembodied souls would agree to be born into, knowing that they might be dealt a lousy social or genetic hand. 22 If you agree {151} that this is a reasonable conception of justice, and that the agents would insist on a broad social safety net and redistributive taxation (short of eliminating incentives that make everyone better off), then you can justify compensatory social policies even if you think differences in social status are 100 percent genetic. The policies would be, quite literally, a matter of justice, not a consequence of the indistinguishability of individuals.
Indeed, the existence of innate differences in ability makes Rawls's conception of social justice especially acute and eternally relevant. If we were blank slates, and if a society ever did eliminate discrimination, the poorest could be
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? said to deserve their station because they must have chosen to do less with their standard-issue talents. But if people differ in talents, people might find themselves in poverty in a nonprejudiced society even if they applied themselves to the fullest. That is an injustice that, a Rawlsian would argue, ought to be rectified, and it would be overlooked if We didn't recognize that people differ in their abilities. ~
Some people have suggested to me that these grandiloquent arguments are just too fancy for the dangerous world we live in. Granted, there is evidence that people are different, but since data in the social sciences are never perfect, and since a conclusion of inequality might be used to the worst ends by bigots or Social Darwinists, shouldn't we err on the side of caution and stick with the null hypothesis that people are identical? Some believe that even if we were certain that people differ genetically, we might still want to promulgate the fiction that they are the same, because it is less open to abuse.
This argument is based on the fallacy that the Blank Slate has nothing but good moral implications and a theory of human nature nothing but bad ones. In the case of human differences, as in the case of human universals, the dangers go both ways. If people in different stations are mistakenly thought to differ in their inherent ability, we might overlook discrimination and unequal opportunity. In Darwin's words, "If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. " But if people in different stations are mistakenly thought to be the same, then we might envy them the rewards they've earned fair and square and might implement coercive policies to hammer down the nails that stick up. The economist Friedrich Hayek wrote, "It is just not true that humans are born equal;. . . if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position; . . . [thus] the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different but in conflict with each other. "23 The philosophers Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Robert Nozick have made similar points.
Unequal treatment in the name of equality can take many forms. Some {152} forms have both defenders and detractors, such as soak-the-rich taxation, heavy estate taxes, streaming by age rather than ability in schools, quotas and preferences that favor certain races or regions, and prohibitions against private medical care or other voluntary transactions. But some can be downright dangerous. If people are assumed to start out identical but some end up wealthier than others, observers may conclude that the wealthier ones must be more rapacious. And as the diagnosis slides from talent to sin, the remedy can shift from redistribution to vengeance. Many atrocities of the twentieth century were committed in the name of egalitarianism, targeting people whose success was taken as evidence of their criminality. The kulaks ("bourgeois peasants") were exterminated by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union; teachers, former landlords, and "rich peasants" were humiliated, tortured, and murdered during China's Cultural Revolution; city dwellers and literate professionals were worked to death or executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. 24 Educated and entrepreneurial minorities who have prospered in their adopted regions, such as the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Jews almost everywhere, have been expelled from their homes or killed in pogroms because their visibly successful members were seen as parasites and exploiters. 25
A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is inherent to all political systems. The major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend there is no tradeoff. And that in turn means that any discovery of innate differences among individuals is not forbidden knowledge to be suppressed but information that might help us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner. ~
The specter of eugenics can be disposed of as easily as the specters of discrimination and Social Darwinism. Once again, the key is to distinguish biological facts from human values.
If people differ genetically in intelligence and character, could we selectively breed for smarter and nicer people? Possibly, though the intricacies of genetics and development would make it far harder than the fans of eugenics imagined. Selective breeding is straightforward for genes with additive effects -- that is, genes that have the same impact regardless of the other genes in the genome. But some traits, such as scientific genius, athletic virtuosity, and musical giftedness, are what behavioral geneticists call emergenic: they materialize only with certain combinations of genes and therefore don't "breed true. "26 Moreover, a given gene can lead to different behavior in different {153} environments. When the biochemist (and radical scientist) George Wald was solicited for a semen sample by William Shockley's sperm bank for Nobel Prize -- winning scientists, he replied, "If you want sperm that produces Nobel
? ? ? ? ? ? Prize winners you should be contacting people like my father, a poor immigrant tailor. What have my sperm given the world? Two guitarists! "27
Whether or not we can breed for certain traits, should we do it? It would require a government wise enough to know which traits to select, knowledgeable enough to know how to implement the breeding, and intrusive enough to encourage or coerce people's most intimate decisions. Few people in a democracy would grant their government that kind of power even if it did promise a better society in the future. The costs in freedom to individuals and in possible abuse by authorities are unacceptable.
Contrary to the belief spread by the radical scientists, eugenics for much of the twentieth century was a favorite cause of the left, not the right. 28 It was championed by many progressives, liberals, and socialists, including Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margaret Sanger, and the Marxist biologists J. B. S. Haldane and Hermann Muller. It's not hard to see why the sides lined up this way. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt Protestants hated eugenics because it was an attempt by intellectual and scientific elites to play God. Progressives loved eugenics because it was on the side of reform rather than the status quo, activism rather than laissez-faire, and social responsibility rather than selfishness. Moreover, they were comfortable expanding state intervention in order to bring about a social goal. Most abandoned eugenics only when they saw how it led to forced sterilizations in the United States and Western Europe and, later, to the policies of Nazi Germany. The history of eugenics is one of many cases in which the moral problems posed by human nature cannot be folded into familiar left-right debates but have to be analyzed afresh in terms of the conflicting values at stake. ~
The most sickening associations of a biological conception of human nature are the ones to Nazism. Though the opposition to the idea of a human nature began decades earlier, historians agree that bitter memories of the Holocaust were the main reason that human nature became taboo in intellectual life after World War II.
Hitler was undeniably influenced by the bastardized versions of Darwinism and genetics that were popular in the early decades of the twentieth century, and he specifically cited natural selection and the survival of the fittest in laying out his poisonous doctrine. He believed in an extreme Social Darwinism in which groups were the unit of selection and a struggle among groups was necessary for national strength and vigor. He believed that the groups were constitutionally distinct races, that their members shared a distinctive {154} biological makeup, and that they differed from one another in strength, courage, honesty, intelligence, and civic-mindedness. He wrote that the extinction of inferior races was part of the wisdom of nature, that the superior races owed their vitality and virtue to their genetic purity, and that the superior races were in danger of being degraded by interbreeding with the inferior ones. He used these beliefs to justify his war of conquest and his genocide of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals. 29
The misuse of biology by the Nazis is a reminder that perverted ideas can have horrifying consequences and that intellectuals have a responsibility to take reasonable care that their ideas not be misused for evil ends. But part of that responsibility is not to trivialize the horror of Nazism by exploiting it for rhetorical clout in academic catfights. Linking the people you disagree with to Nazism does nothing for the memory of Hitler's victims or for the effort to prevent other genocides. It is precisely because these events are so grave that we have a special responsibility to identify their causes precisely.
An idea is not false or evil because the Nazis misused it. As the historian Robert Richards wrote of an alleged connection between Nazism and evolutionary biology, "If such vague similarities suffice here, we should all be hustled to the gallows. "30 Indeed, if we censored ideas that the Nazis abused, we would have to give up far more than the application of evolution and genetics to human behavior. We would have to censor the study of evolution and genetics, period. And we would have to suppress many other ideas that Hitler twisted into the foundations of Nazism:
? The germ theory of disease: The Nazis repeatedly cited Pasteur and Koch to argue that the Jews were like an infectious bacillus that had to be eradicated to control a contagious disease.
? Romanticism, environmentalism, and the love of nature: The Nazis amplified a Romantic strain in German culture that believed the Volk were a people of destiny with a mystical bond to nature and the land. The Jews and other minorities, in contrast, took root in the degenerate cities.
? Philology and linguistics: The concept of the Aryan race was based on a prehistoric tribe posited by linguists, the Indo-Europeans, who were thought to have spilled out of an ancient homeland thousands of years ago and to have conquered much of Europe and Asia.
? Religious belief: Though Hitler disliked Christianity, he was not an atheist, and was emboldened by the conviction that he was carrying out a divinely ordained plan. 31
? ? ? ? ? ? The danger that we might distort our own science as a reaction to the Nazis' distortions is not hypothetical. The historian of science Robert Proctor has shown that American public health officials were slow to acknowledge that
{155} smoking causes cancer because it was the Nazis who had originally established the link. 32 And some German scientists argue that biomedical research has been crippled in their country because of vague lingering associations to Nazism. 33
Hitler was evil because he caused the deaths of thirty million people and conceivable suffering to countless others, not because his beliefs made reference to biology (or linguistics or nature or smoking or God). Smearing the guilt from his actions to every conceivable aspect of his factual beliefs can only backfire. Ideas are connected to other ideas, and should any of Hitler's turn out to have some grain of truth -- if races, for example, turn out to have any biological reality, or if the Indo-Europeans really were a conquering tribe -- we would not want to concede that Nazism wasn't so wrong after all.
The Nazi Holocaust was a singular event that changed attitudes toward countless political and scientific topics. But it was not the only ideologically inspired holocaust in the twentieth century, and intellectuals are only beginning to assimilate the lessons of the others: the mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and other totalitarian states carried out in the name of Marxism. The opening of Soviet archives and the release of data and memoirs on the Chinese and Cambodian revolutions are forcing a reevaluation of the consequences of ideology as wrenching as that following World War II. Historians are currently debating whether the Communists' mass executions, forced marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred million deaths or "only" twenty-five million. They are debating whether these atrocities are morally worse than the Nazi Holocaust or "only" the equivalent. 34
And here is the remarkable fact: though both Nazi and Marxist ideologies led to industrial-scale killing, their biological and psychological theories were opposites. Marxists had no use for the concept of race, were averse to the notion of genetic inheritance, and were hostile to the very idea of a human nature rooted in biology. 35 Marx and Engels did not explicitly embrace the doctrine of the Blank Slate in their writings, but they were adamant that human nature has no enduring properties. It consists only in the interactions of groups of people with their material environments in a historical period, and constantly changes as people change their environment and are simultaneously changed by it. 36 The mind therefore has no innate structure but emerges from the dialectical processes of history and social interaction. As Marx put it:
All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature. 37
Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. 38
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of {156} men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. 39
In a foreshadowing of Durkheim's and Kroeber's insistence that individual human minds are not worthy of attention, Marx wrote:
Man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world of men, the State and Society. The essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each particular individual. The real nature of man is the totality of social relations. 40
Individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests. 41
[Death] seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to contradict their unity.
But the particular individual is only a particular species-being, and as such mortal. 42
Marx's twentieth-century followers did embrace the Blank Slate, or a: least the related metaphor of malleable material. Lenin endorsed Nikolai Bukharin's ideal of "the manufacturing of Communist man out of the human material of the capitalist age. "43 Lenin's admirer Maxim Gorky wrote, "The working classes are to Lenin what minerals are to the metallurgist"44 and "Human raw material is immeasurably more difficult to work with than wood" (the latter while admiring a canal built by slave labor). 45 We come across the metaphor of the blank slate in the writings of a man who may have been responsible for sixty-five million deaths:
A blank sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? -- Mao Zedong46 -- Khmer Rouge slogan47
? And we find it in a saying of a political movement that killed a quarter of its countrymen: Only the newborn baby is spotless.
? The new realization that government-sponsored mass murder can come from an anti-innatist belief system as easily as from an innatist one upends the postwar understanding that biological approaches to behavior are uniquely {157} sinister. An accurate appraisal of the cause of state genocides must look for beliefs common to Nazism and Marxism that launched them on their parallel trajectories, and for the beliefs specific to Marxism that led to the unique atrocities committed in its name. A new wave of historians and philosophers is doing exactly that. 48
Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. "The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary," wrote Marx; "the will to create mankind anew" is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. 49 They also shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disaster. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, "Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology"
The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. 50 Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. 51 It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn't matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin. 52
The ideology of group-against-group struggle explains the similar outcomes of Marxism and Nazism. The ideology of the Blank Slate helps explain some of the features that were unique to the Marxist states:
? If people do not differ in psychological traits like talent or drive, then anyone who is better off must be avaricious or larcenous (as I mentioned {158} earlier). Massive killing of kulaks and "rich" or "bourgeois" peasants was a feature of Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia.
? If the mind is structureless at birth and shaped by its experience, a society that wants the right kind of minds must control the experience ("It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written"). 53 Twentieth-century Marxist states were not just dictatorships but totalitarian dictatorships. They tried to control every aspect of life: childrearing, education, clothing, entertainment, architecture, the arts, even food and sex. Authors in the Soviet Union were enjoined to become "engineers of human souls. " In China and Cambodia, mandatory communal dining halls, same-sex adult dormitories, and the separation of children from parents were recurring (and detested) experiments.
? If people are shaped by their social environments, then growing up bourgeois can leave a permanent psychological stain ("Only the newborn baby is spotless"). The descendants of landlords and "rich peasants" in postrevolutionary regimes bore a permanent stigma and were persecuted as readily as if bourgeois parentage were a genetic trait. Worse, since parentage is invisible but discoverable by third parties, the practice of outing people with a "bad background" became a weapon of social competition. That led to the atmosphere of denunciation and paranoia that made life in these regimes an Orwellian nightmare.
? If there is no human nature leading people to favor the interests of their families over "society," then people who produce more crops on their own plots than on communal farms whose crops are confiscated by the state must be greedy or lazy and punished accordingly. Fear rather than self-interest
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? becomes the incentive to work.
? Most generally, if individual minds are interchangeable components of a superorganic entity called society, then the society, not the individual, is the natural unit of health and well-being and the proper beneficiary of human striving. The rights of the individual person have no place.
None of this is meant to impugn the Blank Slate as an evil doctrine, any more than a belief in human nature is an evil doctrine. Both are separated by a great many steps from the wicked acts committed under their banners, and they must be evaluated on factual grounds. But it is meant to overturn the simplistic linkage of the sciences of human nature with the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century. That glib association stands in the way of our desire to understand ourselves, and it stands in the way of the imperative to understand the causes of those catastrophes. All the more so if the causes have something to do with a side of ourselves we do not fully understand.
? <<
{159} >> Chapter 9
The Fear of Imperfectibility
But Nature then was sovereign in my mind, And mighty forms, seizing a youthful fancy, Had given a charter to irregular hopes.
In any age of uneventful calm
Among the nations, surely would my heart Have been possessed by similar desire;
But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.
-- William Wordsworth1
? ? ? ? ? In Wordsworth's reminiscence we find the second fear raised by an innate psyche. The Romantic poet is exhilarated by the thought that human nature can be born again, and could only be depressed by the possibility that we are permanently saddled with our fatal flaws and deadly sins. Romantic political thinkers have the same reaction, because an unchanging human nature would seem to subvert all hope for reform. Why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and will just foul it up no matter what you do? It is no coincidence that the writings of Rousseau inspired both the Romantic movement in literature and the French Revolution in history, or that the 1960s would see a resurfacing of romanticism and radical politics in tandem. The philosopher John Passmore has shown that a yearning for a better world through a new and improved human nature is a recurring motif in Western thought, which he summarizes in a remark by D. H. Lawrence: "The Perfectibility of Man! Ah, heaven, what a dreary theme! "2
The dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One is a practical fear: that social reform is a waste of time because human nature is unchangeable. The other is a deeper concern, which grows out of the Romantic belief that what is natural is good. According to the worry, if scientists {160} suggest it is "natural" -- part of human nature -- to be adulterous, violent, ethnocentric, and selfish, they would be implying that these traits are good, not just unavoidable.
As with the other convictions surrounding the Blank Slate, the fear of imperfectibility makes some sense in the context of twentieth-century history. A revulsion to the idea that people are naturally bellicose or xenophobic is an understandable reaction to an ideology that glorified war. One of the most memorable images I came across as a graduate student was a painting of a dead soldier in a muddy field. A uniformed ghost floated up from his corpse, one arm around a cloaked and faceless man, the other around a bare-breasted blond valkyrie. The caption read, "Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory. " Was it a kitschy poster recruiting cannon fodder for an imperial exploit? A jingoistic monument in the castle of Prussian military aristocrat? No, Death and Victory was painted in 1922 by the great American artist John Singer Sargent and hangs prominently in one of the world's most famous scholarly libraries, the Widener at Harvard University.
That a piece of pro-death iconography should decorate these hallowed halls of learning is a testament to the warmongering mentality of decades past. War was thought to be invigorating, ennobling, the natural aspiration of men and nations. This belief led world leaders to sleepwalk into World War I and millions of men to enlist eagerly,
? ? oblivious to the carnage that lay ahead. Beginning with the disillusionment following that war and culminating in the widespread opposition to the war in Vietnam, Western sensibilities have steadily recoiled from the glorification of combat. Even recent works meant to honor the courage of fighting men, such as the movie Saving Private Ryan, show war as a hell that brave men endured at terrible cost to eliminate an identified evil, not something they could possibly feel "happy" about. Real wars today are waged with remote-control gadgetry to minimize casualties, sometimes at the cost of downgrading the war's objectives. In this climate any suggestion that war is "natural" will be met with indignant declarations to the contrary, such as the recurring Statements on Violence by social scientists averring that it is "scientifically incorrect" to say that humans have tendencies toward aggression. 3
A hostility to the idea that selfish sexual urges might be rooted in our nature comes from feminism. For millennia women have suffered under a double standard based on assumptions about differences between the sexes. Laws and customs punished the philandering of women more harshly than the philandering of men. Fathers and husbands stripped women of control over their sexuality by constraining their appearance and movement. Legal systems exonerated rapists or mitigated their punishment if the victim was thought to have aroused an irresistible urge by her dress or behavior. Authorities brushed off victims of harassment, stalking, and battering by assuming that these
{161} crimes were normal features of courtship or marriage. Because of a fear of accepting any idea that would seem to make these outrages "natural" or unavoidable, some schools of feminism have rejected any suggestion that men are born with greater sexual desire or jealousy. We saw in Chapter 7 that the claim that men want casual sex more than women do has been denounced by both the right and the left. Even heavier bipartisan fire has recently been aimed at Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer for suggesting in their book A Natural History of Rape that rape is a consequence of men's sexuality. A spokesperson from the Feminist Majority Foundation called the book "scary" and "regressive" because it "almost validates the crime and blames the victim. "4 A spokesperson for the Discovery Institute, a creationist organization, testified at a U. S. congressional hearing that the book threatened the moral fabric upon which America is founded. 5
A third vice with political implications is selfishness. If people, like other animals, are driven by selfish genes, selfishness might seem inevitable or even a virtue. The argument is fallacious from the start because selfish genes do not necessarily grow selfish organisms. Still, let us consider the possibility that people might have some tendency to value their own interests and those of their family and friends above the interests of the tribe, society, or species. The political implications are spelled out in the two major philosophies of how societies should be organized, which make opposite assumptions about innate human selfishness:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-
? ? ? ? ? love.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
-- Adam Smith
-- Karl Marx
Smith the explainer of capitalism assumes that people will selfishly give their labor according to their needs and will be paid according to their abilities (because the payers are selfish, too). Marx the architect of communism and socialism assumes that in a socialist society of the future the butcher, the brewer, and the baker will provide us with dinner out of benevolence or self-actualization -- for why else would they cheerfully exert themselves according to their abilities and not according to their needs?
Those who believe that communism or socialism is the most rational form of social organization are aghast at the suggestion that they run against our selfish natures. For that matter, everyone, regardless of politics, has to be appalled at people who impose costs on society in pursuit of their individual {162} interests -- hunting endangered species, polluting rivers, destroying historic sites to build shopping malls, spraying graffiti on public monuments, inventing weapons that elude metal detectors. Equally disturbing are the outcomes of actions that make sense to the individual choosing them but are costly to society when everyone chooses them. Examples include overfishing a harbor, overgrazing a commons, commuting on a bumper-to-bumper freeway, or buying a sport utility vehicle to protect oneself in a collision because everyone else is driving a sport utility vehicle. Many people dislike the suggestion that humans are inclined to selfishness because it would seem to imply that these self-defeating patterns of behavior are inevitable, or at least reducible only through p~ermanent coercive measures.
The fear of imperfectibility and the resultant embrace of the Blank Slate are rooted in a pair of fallacies. We have already met the naturalistic fallacy, the belief that whatever happens in nature is good. One might think that the belief was irreversibly tainted by Social Darwinism, but it was revived by the romanticism of the 1960s and 1970s. The
? environmentalist movement, in particular, often appeals to the goodness of nature to promote conservation of natural environments, despite their ubiquitous gore. For example, predators such as wolves, bears, and sharks have been given an image makeover as euthanists of the old and the lame, and thus worthy of preservation or reintroduction. It would seem to follow that anything we have inherited from this Eden is healthy and proper, so a claim that aggression or rape is "natural," in the sense of having been favored by evolution, is tantamount to saying that it is good.
The naturalistic fallacy leads quickly to its converse, the moralistic fallacy: that if a trait is moral, it must be found in nature. That is, not only does "is" imply "ought," but "ought" implies "is. " Nature, including human nature, is stipulated to have only virtuous traits (no needless killings, no rapacity, no exploitation), or no traits at all, because the alternative is too horrible to accept. That is why the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies are so often associated with the Noble Savage and the Blank Slate.
Defenders of the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies are not made of straw but include prominent scholars and writers. For example, in response to Thornhill's earlier writings on rape, the feminist scholar Susan Brownmiller wrote, "It seems quite clear that the biologicization of rape and the dismissal of social or 'moral' factors will . . . tend to legitimate rape. . . . It is reductive and reactionary to isolate rape from other forms of violent antisocial behavior and dignify it with adaptive significance. "6 Note the fallacy: if something is explained with biology, it has been "legitimated"; if something is shown to be adaptive, it has been "dignified. " Similarly, Stephen Jay Gould wrote of another discussion of rape in animals, "By falsely describing an inherited behavior in birds with an old name for a deviant human action, we subtly suggest that true {163} rape -- our own kind -- might be a natural behavior with Darwinian advantages to certain people as well. "7 The implicit rebuke is that to describe an act as "natural" or as having "Darwinian advantages" is somehow to condone it.
The moralistic fallacy, like the naturalistic fallacy, is, well, a fallacy, as we learn from this Arlo and Janis cartoon:
The boy has biology on his side. 8 George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as "grossly immoral. "9 Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection "can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness. " On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. 10 Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote:
The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: "Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful. . . "11
As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a "natural" trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above. "
Crucially, this cuts both ways. Many commentators from the religious and cultural right believe that any behavior that strikes them as biologically {164} atypical, such as homosexuality, voluntary childlessness, and women who assume traditional male roles or vice versa, should be condemned because it is "unnatural. " For example, the popular talk-show host Laura Schlesinger has declared, "I am getting people to stop doing wrong and start doing right. " As part of this crusade she has called on gay people to submit to therapy to change their sexual orientation, because
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? homosexuality is a "biological error. " This kind of moral reasoning can come only from people who know nothing about biology. Most activities that moral people extol -- being faithful to one's spouse, turning the other cheek, treating every child as precious, loving thy neighbor as thyself -- are "biological errors" and are utterly unnatural in the rest of the living world.
Acknowledging the naturalistic fallacy does not mean that facts about human nature are irrelevant to our choices. 12 The political scientist Roger Masters, noting that the naturalistic fallacy can be invoked too glibly to deny the relevance of biology to human affairs, points out, "When the physician says a patient ought to have an operation because the facts show appendicitis, the patient is unlikely to complain about a fallacious logical deduction.