No More Learning

According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below (hence Samuel Johnson's disclaimer that he could not "change sublunary nature"). Surrounding the moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were the heavens, home to God. Contained within the sphere of the moon, and thus a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order, human bodies, animals (in the order beasts, birds, fish, insects), then plants, minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the center of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being.
The Great Chain was thick with moral implications. Our home, it was thought, lay at the center of the universe, reflecting the importance of our existence and behavior. People lived their lives in their proper station (king, duke, or peasant), and after death their souls rose to a higher place or sank to a lower one. Everyone had to be mindful that the human abode was a humble place in the scheme of things and that they must look up to catch a glimpse of heavenly perfection. And in a world that seemed always to teeter on the brink of famine and barbarism, the Great Chain offered the comfort of knowing that the nature of things was orderly. If the planets wandered from their spheres, chaos would break out, because everything was connected in the cosmic order. {138}
As Alexander Pope wrote, "From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, / Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. "1
None of this escaped Galileo as he was pounding away at his link. He knew that he could not simply argue on empirical grounds that the division between a corrupt Earth and the unchanging heavens was falsified by sunspots, novas, and moons drifting across Jupiter. He also argued that the moral trappings of the geocentric theory were as dubious as its empirical claims, so if the theory turned out to be false, no one would be the worse. Here is Galileo's alter ego in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, wondering what is so great about being invariant and inalterable:
For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If, not being subject to any changes, it were a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? vast desert of sand or mountain of jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters which covered it had frozen, and it had remained an enormous globe of ice where nothing was ever born or ever altered or changed, I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially nonexistent. This is exactly the difference between a living animal and a dead one; and I say the same of the moon, of Jupiter, and of all other world globes.
. . . Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, et cetera, are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa's head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are. 2
Today we see things Galileo's way. It's hard for us to imagine why the three-dimensional arrangement of rock and gas in space should have anything to do with right and wrong or with the meaning and purpose of our lives. The moral sensibilities of Galileo s time eventually adjusted to the astronomical facts, not just because they had to give a nod to reality but because the very idea that morality has something to do with a Great Chain of Being was daffy to begin with.
We are now living, I think, through a similar transition. The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galileo, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious. {139}
This part of the book will show why a renewed conception of meaning and morality will survive the demise of the Blank Slate. I am not, to say the least, proposing a novel philosophy of life like the spiritual leader of some new cult. The arguments I will lay out have been around for centuries and have been advanced by some of history's greatest thinkers. My goal is to put them down in one place and connect them to the apparent moral challenges from the sciences of human nature, to serve as a reminder of why the sciences will not lead to a Nietzschean total eclipse of all values.
The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears:
? If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified.
? If people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile.
? If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.
? If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.
Each will get a chapter. I will first explain the basis of the fear: which claims about human nature are at stake, and why they are thought to have treacherous implications. I will then show that in each case the logic is faulty; the implications simply do not follow. But I will go farther than that. It's not just that claims about human nature are less dangerous than many people think. It's that the denial of human nature can be more dangerous than people think. This makes it imperative to examine claims about human nature objectively, without putting a moral thumb on either side of the scale, and to figure out how we can live with the claims should they turn out to be true.
<< {141} >> Chapter 8
The Fear of Inequality
The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality. Blank is blank, so if we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils.
The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life -- their income, status, and crime rate, for example -- come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -- by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children, by taking that decision out of their hands, or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the "final solution" because they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist -- or even that human nature does not exist, because if it did, innate differences would be possible.
I hope that once this line of reasoning is laid out, it will immediately set off alarm bells. We should not concede that any foreseeable discovery about humans could have such horrible implications. The problem is not with the possibility that people might differ from one another, which is a factual question that could turn out one way or the other. The problem is with the line of reasoning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all. Fundamental values (such as {142} equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might be refuted tomorrow. In this chapter we will see how these values mi~ght be put on a more secure foundation.
What kinds of differences are there to worry about? The chapters on gender and children will review the current evidence on differences between sexes and individuals, together with their implications and non-implications. The goal of this part of the chapter is more general: to lay out the kinds of differences that research could turn up over the long term, based on our understanding of human evolution and genetics, and to lay out the moral issues they raise. This book is primarily about human nature -- an endowment of cognitive and emotional faculties that is universal to healthy members of Homo sapiens. Samuel Johnson wrote, "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure. "1 The abundant evidence that we share a human nature does not mean that the differences among individuals, races, or sexes are also in our nature. Confucius could have been right when he wrote, "Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart. "2
Modern biology tells us that the forces that make people alike are not the same as the forces that make people different. 3 (Indeed, they tend to be studied by different scientists: the similarities by evolutionary psychologists, the differences by behavioral geneticists. ) Natural selection works to homogenize a species into a standard overall design by concentrating the effective genes -- the ones that build well-functioning organs -- and winnowing out the ineffective ones. When it comes to an explanation of what makes us tick, we are thus birds of a feather. Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs. This is most obvious in the case of language, where every neurologically intact child is equipped to acquire any human language, but it is true of other parts of the mind as well. Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences. 4
We are all pretty much alike, but we are not, of course, clones. Except in the case of identical twins, each person is genetically unique. That is because random mutations infiltrate the genome and take time to be eliminated, and they are shuffled together in new combinations when individuals sexually reproduce. Natural selection tends to preserve some degree of genetic heterogeneity at the microscopic level in the form of small, random variations among proteins. That variation twiddles the combinations of an organism's molecular locks and keeps its descendants one step ahead of the microscopic germs that are constantly evolving to crack those locks.
All species harbor genetic variability, but Homo sapiens is among the less variable ones. Geneticists call us a "small" species, which sounds like a bad joke {143} given that we have infested the planet like roaches. What they mean is that the amount of genetic variation found among humans is what a biologist would expect in a species with a small number of members. 5 There are more genetic differences among chimpanzees, for instance, than there are among humans, even though we dwarf them in number. The reason is that our ancestors passed through a population bottleneck fairly recently in our evolutionary history (less than a hundred thousand years ago) and dwindled to a small number of individuals with a correspondingly small amount of genetic variation. The species survived and rebounded, and then underwent a population explosion after the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago. That explosion bred many copies of the genes that were around when we were sparse in number; there has not been much time to accumulate many new versions of the genes.
At various points after the bottleneck, differences between races emerged. But the differences in skin and hair that are so obvious when we look at people of other races are really a trick played on our intuitions. Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do. 6 Working in opposition to the adaptation to local climates, which makes groups different on the skin, is an evolutionary force that makes neighboring groups similar inside. Rare genes can offer immunity to endemic diseases, so they get sucked into one group from a neighboring group like ink on a blotter, even if members of one group mate with members of the other infrequently. 7 That is why Jews, for example, tend to be genetically similar to their non-Jewish neighbors all over the world, even though until
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? recently they tended to marry other Jews. As little as one conversion, affair, or rape involving a gentile in every generation can be enough to blur genetic boundaries over time. 8
Taking all these processes into account, we get the following picture. People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.
But biology does not let us off the hook entirely. Individuals are not genetically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of the body except the brain. And though genetic differences between races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent (as we see in their ability to give rise to physical differences and to {144} different susceptibilities to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia). Nowadays it is popular to say that races do not exist but are purely social constructions. Though that is certainly true of bureaucratic pigeonholes such as "colored," "Hispanic," "Asian/Pacific Islander," and the one-drop rule for being "black," it is an overstatement when it comes to human differences in general. The biological anthropologist Vincent Sarich points out that a race is just a very large and partly inbred family. Some racial distinctions thus may have a degree of biological reality, even though they are not exact boundaries between fixed categories. Humans, having recently evolved from a single founder population, are all related, but Europeans, having mostly bred with other Europeans for millennia, are on average more closely related to other Europeans than they are to Africans or Asians, and vice versa. Because oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges have prevented people from choosing mates at random in the past, the large inbred families we call races are still discernible, each with a somewhat different distribution of gene frequencies. In theory, some of the varying genes could affect personality or intelligence (though any such differences would at most apply to averages, with vast overlap between the group members). This is not to say that such genetic differences are expected or that we have evidence for them, only that they are biologically possible.
(My own view, incidentally, is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference -- the black-white IQ gap in the United States -- the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation. Thomas Sowell has documented that in most of the twentieth century and throughout the world, ethnic differences in IQ were the rule, not the exception. 9 Members of minority groups who were out of the cultural mainstream commonly had average IQs that fell below that of the majority, including immigrants to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, the children of white mountaineers in the United States, children who grew up on canal boats in Britain, and Gaelic-speaking children in the Hebrides. The differences were at least as large as the current black-white gap but disappeared within a few generations. For many reasons, the experience of African Americans in the United States under slavery and segregation is not comparable to those of immigrants or rural isolates, and their transition to mainstream cultural patterns could easily take longer. )10
And then there are the sexes. Unlike ethnic groups and races, in which any differences are biologically minor and haphazard, the two sexes differ in at least one way that is major and systematic: they have different reproductive organs. On evolutionary grounds one might expect men and women to differ somewhat in the neural systems that control how they use those organs -- in their sexuality, parental instincts, and mating tactics. By the same logic, one would expect them not to differ as much in the neural systems that deal with {145} the challenges both sexes face, such as those for general intelligence (as we will see in the~chapter on gender).
So could discoveries in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Absolutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs. Enlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant. Discriminating against people on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity would be unfair, penalizing them for traits over which they have no control. It would perpetuate the injustices of the past, in which African Americans, women, and other groups were enslaved or oppressed. It would rend society into hostile factions and could escalate into horrific persecution. But none of these arguments against discrimination depends on whether groups of people are or are not genetically indistinguishable.
Far from being conducive to discrimination, a conception of human nature is the reason we oppose it. Here is where the distinction between innate variation and innate universals is crucial. Regardless of IQ or physical strength or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly, that is, according to traits that the person cannot control. The revulsion we feel toward discrimination and slavery comes from a conviction that however much people
? ? ? ? ? vary on some traits, they do not vary on these. This conviction contrasts, by the way, with the supposedly progressive doctrine that people have no inherent concerns, which implies that they could be conditioned to enjoy servitude or degradation.
The idea that political equality is a moral stance, not an empirical hypothesis, has been expressed by some of history's most famous exponents of equality. The Declaration of Independence proclaims, "We hold these truths to be self- evident; that all men are created equal. " The author, Thomas Jefferson, made it clear that he was referring to an equality of rights, not a biological sameness. For example, in an 1813 letter to John Adams he wrote: "I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. . . . For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son. "11 (The fact that the Declaration originally was applied only to white men, and that Jefferson was far from an egalitarian in the conduct of his own life, does not change the argument. Jefferson defended political equality among white men -- a novel idea in his time -- even as he acknowledged innate differences among white men. ) Similarly, Abraham Lincoln thought that the signers of the Declaration "did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, {146} intellect, moral development or social capacity," but only in respect to "certain inalienable rights. "12 Some of the most influential contemporary thinkers about biology and human nature have drawn the same distinction. Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of the modern theory of evolution, wisely anticipated nearly four decades of debate when he wrote in 1963:
Equality in spite of evident nonidentity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to "conditioning" or other nongenetic factors. Such authors conveniently ignore the results of twin studies and of the genetic analysis of nonmorphological traits in animals. An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. 13
Noam Chomsky made the same point in an article entitled "Psychology and Ideology.
" Though he disagreed with Herrnstein's argument about IQ (discussed in Chapter 6), he denied the popular charge that Herrnstein was a racist and distanced himself from fellow radical scientists who were denouncing the facts as dangerous:
A correlation between race and IQ (were this shown to exist) entails no social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his own right, but as a representative of this category. Herrnstein mentions a possible correlation between height and IQ. Of what social importance is that? None of course, since our society does not suffer under discrimination by height. We do not insist on assigning each adult to the category "below six feet in height" or "above six feet in height" when we ask what sort of education he should receive or where he should live or what work he should do. Rather, he is what he is, quite independent of the mean IQ of people of his height category. In a nonracist society, the category of race would be of no greater significance. The mean IQ of individuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of a particular individual who is what he is. . . .
It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might
be heritable, perhaps largely so. {147}
Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the one-
hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or
another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to
serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society?
14
Some readers may not be reassured by this lofty stance. If all ethnic groups and both sexes were identical in all talents, then discrimination would simply be self-defeating, and people would abandon it as soon as the facts were known. But if they are not identical, it would be rational to take those differences into account. After all, according to Bayes' theorem a decision maker who needs to make a prediction (such as whether a person will succeed in a profession) should factor in the prior probability, such as the base rate of success for people in that group. If races or sexes are different on average, racial profiling or gender stereotyping would be actuarially sound, and it would be nai? ve to expect information about race and sex not to be used for prejudicial ends. So a policy to treat people as individuals seems like a thin reed on which to hang any hope of reducing discrimination.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? An immediate reply to this worry is that the danger arises whether the differences between groups are genetic or environmental in origin. An average is an average, and an actuarial decision maker should care only about what it is, not what caused it.
Moreover, the fact that discrimination can be economically rational would be truly dangerous only if our policies favored ruthless economic optimization regardless of all other costs. But in fact we have many policies that allow moral principles to trump economic efficiency. For example, it is illegal to sell your vote, sell your organs, or sell your children, even though an economist could argue that any voluntary exchange leaves both parties better off. These decisions come naturally in modern democracies, and we can just as resolutely choose public policies and private mores that disallow race and gender prejudice. 15
Moral and legal proscriptions are not the only way to reduce discrimination in the face of possible group differences. The more information we have about the qualifications of an individual, the less impact a race-wide or sex-wide average would have in any statistical decision concerning that person. The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive information about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future. )
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.