No More Learning

. 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. "13 Acknowledging the naturalistic fallacy implies only that discoveries about human nature do not, by themselves, dictate our choices. The facts must be combined with a statement of values and a method of resolving conflicts among them. Given the fact of appendicitis, the value that health is desirable, and the conviction that the pain and expense of the operation are outweighed by the resulting gain in health, one ought to have the operation.
Suppose rape is rooted in a feature of human nature, such as that men want sex across a wider range of circumstances than women do. It is also a feature of human nature, just as deeply rooted in our evolution, that women want control over when and with whom they have sex. It is inherent to our value system that the interests of women should not be subordinated to those of men, and that control over one's body is a fundamental right that trumps other people's desires. So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men's sexuality. Note how this calculus requires a "deterministic" and "essentialist" claim about human nature: that women abhor being raped. Without that claim we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape and trying to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw material.
In other cases, the best way to resolve a conflict is not as obvious. The psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have documented that stepparents are far more likely to abuse a child than are biological parents. The discovery was by no means banal: many parenting experts insist that the abusive stepparent is a myth originating in Cinderella stories and that parenting is a "role" that anyone can take on. Daly and Wilson had originally examined the abuse statistics to test a prediction from evolutionary psychology. 14 Parental love is selected over {165} evolutionary time because it compels parents to protect and nurture their children, who are likely to carry the genes giving rise to parental love. In any species in which someone else's offspring are likely to enter the family circle, selection will favor a tendency to prefer one's own, because in the cold reckoning of natural selection an investment in the unrelated children would go to waste. A parent's patience will tend to run out with stepchildren more quickly than with biological children, and in extreme cases this can lead to abuse.
Does all this mean that social service agencies should monitor stepparents more closely than biological parents? Not so fast. The vast majority of both kinds of parents never commit abuse, so putting stepparents under a cloud of suspicion would be unfair to millions of innocent people. As the legal scholar Owen Jones points out, the evolutionary analysis of stepparenting -- or of anything else -- has no automatic policy implications. Rather, it delineates a tradeoff and forces us to choose an optimum along it. In this case, the tradeoff is between minimizing child abuse while stigmatizing stepparents, on one hand, and being maximally fair to stepparents while tolerating an increase in child abuse, on the other. 15 If we did not know that people are predisposed to lose patience with stepchildren faster than with biological children, we would implicitly choose one end of this tradeoff -- ignoring step- parenting as a risk factor altogether, and tolerating the extra cases of child abuse -- without even realizing it.
An understanding of human nature with all its weaknesses can enrich not just our policies but our personal lives. Families with stepchildren tend to be less happy and more fragile than families with biological children, largely because of tensions over how much time, patience, and money the stepparents should expend. Many stepparents, nonetheless, are kind and generous to a spouse's children, in part out of love for the spouse. Still, there is a difference between the instinctive love that parents automatically lavish on their own children and the deliberate kindness and generosity that wise stepparents extend to their stepchildren. Understanding this difference, Daly and Wilson suggest, could enhance a marriage. 16 Though a marriage based on strict tit-for-tat reciprocity is generally miserable, a good marriage finds each spouse appreciating the sacrifices that the other has made over the long haul. Acknowledging a partner's conscious benevolence toward one's children may ultimately breed less resentment and misunderstanding than demanding such benevolence as a matter of course and begrudging any ambivalence the partner may feel. It is one of many ways in which a realism about the imperfect emotions we actually have may bring more happiness than an illusion about the ideal emotions we wish we had. ~
So if we are put in this world to rise above nature, how do we do it? Where in the causal chain of evolved genes building a neural computer do we find a {166} chink into which we can fit the seemingly unmechanical event of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? "choosing values"? By allowing for choice, are we just inviting a ghost back into the machine?
The question is itself a symptom of the Blank Slate. If one starts off thinking the slate is blank, then when someone proposes an innate desire one will mentally plunk it onto the barren surface in one's imagination and conclude that it must be an ineluctable urge, because there is nothing else on the slate to counteract it. Selfish thoughts translate into selfish behavior, aggressive urges beget natural-born killers, a taste for multiple sexual partners means that men just can't help fooling around. For example, when the primatologist Michael Ghiglieri appeared on the National Public Radio program Science Friday to talk about his book on violence, the interviewer asked, "You explain rape and murder and war and all the bad things that men do as something -- if I would just boil it down -- something they can't help because of its -- it's locked up in their evolutionary genes there? "17
If, however, the mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else.
The faculties underlying empathy, foresight, and self-respect are information-processing systems that accept input and commandeer other parts of the brain and body. They are combinatorial systems, like the mental grammar underlying language, capable of cranking out an unlimited number of ideas and courses of action. Personal and social change can come about when people exchange information that affects those mechanisms -- even if we are nothing but meat puppets, glorified clockwork, or lumbering robots created by selfish genes.
Not only is acknowledging human nature compatible with social and moral progress, but it can help explain the obvious progress that has taken place over millennia. Customs that were common throughout history and prehistory -- slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, genocide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers, rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal ownership of women -- have vanished from large parts of the world.
The philosopher Peter Singer has shown how continuous moral progress can emerge from a fixed moral sense. 18 Suppose we are endowed with a {167} conscience that treats other persons as targets of sympathy and inhibits us from harming or exploiting them. Suppose, too, that we have a mechanism for assessing whether a living thing gets
to be classified as a person. (After all, we don't want to classify plants as persons and starve before we would eat them. ) Singer explains moral improvement in the title of his book: The Expanding Circle. People have steadily expanded the mental dotted line that embraces the entities considered worthy of moral consideration. The circle has been poked outward from the family and village to the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and most recently (as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to all of humanity. It has been slackened from royalty, aristocracy, and property holders to all men. It has grown from including only men to including women, children, and newborns. It has crept outward to embrace criminals, prisoners of war, enemy civilians, the dying, and the mentally handicapped. Nor are the possibilities for moral progress over. Today some people want to enlarge the circle to include great apes, warm-blooded creatures, or animals with central nervous systems. Some want to count in zygotes, blastocysts, fetuses, and the brain-dead. Still others want to embrace species, ecosystems, or the entire planet. This sweeping change in sensibilities, the driving force in the moral history of our species, did not require a blank slate or a ghost in the machine. It could have arisen from a moral gadget containing a single knob or slider that adjusts the size of the circle embracing the entities whose interests we treat as comparable to our own.
The expansion of the moral circle does not have to be powered by some mysterious drive toward goodness. It may come from the interaction between the selfish process of evolution and a law of complex systems. The biologists
John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary and the journalist Robert Wright have explained how evolution can lead to greater and greater degrees of cooperation. 19 Repeatedly in the history of life, replicators have teamed up, specialized to divide the labor, and coordinated their behavior. It happens because replicators often find themselves in non-zero- sum games, in which particular strategies adopted by two players can leave them both better off (as opposed to a zero- sum game, where one player's profit is another player's loss). An exact analogy is found in the play by William Butler Yeats in which a blind man carries a lame man on his shoulders, allowing both of them to get around. During the evolution of life this dynamic has led replicating molecules to team up in chromosomes, organelles to team up in cells, cells to agglomerate into complex organisms, and organisms to hang out in societies. Independent agents repeatedly made their fate hostage to a larger system, not because they are inherently civic-minded but because they benefited from the division of labor and developed ways of damping conflicts among the agents making up the system.
Human societies, like living things, have become more complicated and cooperative over time. Again, it is because
? ? ? ? agents do better when they team up {168} and specialize in pursuit of their shared interests, as long as they solve the problems of exchanging information and punishing cheaters. If I have more fruit than I can eat and you have more meat than you can eat, it pays each of us to trade our surplus with the other. If we face a common enemy, then, as Benjamin Franklin put it, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. "
Wright argues that three features of human nature led to a steady expansion of the circle of human cooperators. One is the cognitive wherewithal to figure out how the world works. This yields know-how worth sharing and an ability to spread goods and information over larger territories, both of which expand opportunities for gains in trade. A second is language, which allows technology to be shared, bargains to be struck, and agreements to be enforced.