I'm listening to Steven Pinker lay out his arguments from The Blank Slate on a TVO podcast, Big Ideas.
I've been thinking for awhile about the annoying but inevitable overreach of this genetics-makes-society paradigm that started with E.O. Wilson, and Chomsky, and the rest.
I think Pinker is an example of a preacher for this paradigm. I read The Blank Slate when it first came out eight or so years ago. I was interested due to it's rejection of the anti-human nature character that I understood to be a phenomena of the outdated academic left, as well as a flaw of socialism, and a key to the evil of twentieth century dictators.
Of course, the idea now is that since before the social sciences got to the point where many said that culture makes everything, we are now getting back to the point where human nature, now genetics, makes everything.
Pinker ties an argument by Steven Jay Gould and Lowentin that claimed that attribution of behavior/culture to genetics was used to maintain existing, and that Social Biology was a continuation of this, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate.
A little later on, he ties in racial prejudice and pogroms against successful racial minorities, whose cultures led them to greater success, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate. The idea that everybody is the same is the idea that allowed this persecution, since it indicates that, among equally Blank Slates, those who get more are greedy.
This is odd. Persecution against Hindu minorities, Chinese minorities, and the Igbo had to do with religion and in-group morality, not social science trends.
As to in-group morality, Pinker paraphrases Singer, who says that this is the default switch of human nature. Pinker goes on to explain that we have had centuries of culture to teach against this. This is odd as well, as we can more simply say that children are taught to regard other people as either acceptable or unacceptable. There is much ambiguity in the way that children, and the adults they become, view their groupings. There is also a whole lot of subtlety. As with modern Chinese, who like us, have distinct, intersecting rings of social networks, including family, in-laws, region-group, coworkers, bosses, classmates (very big for them), and friends.
Little children in these primitive tribes may or may not hate reflexively dehumanize other tribes. And here, we get a taste of the commonality that the new Genotypic Social Sciences have with the previous excesses of culture and system: The avoidance of psychology and avoidance of the complexity of personal experience.
But when we look at those savages, regarded as our recent cultural ancestors, perhaps the way 'we' were before the Holocene, we are supposed to see a simpler version of ourselves, which reflects our true human nature (universal genetic tendency.)
I just had a Physical Anthropology professor who's thesis showed that men's pickiness in female selection evolved because it promoted status and greater access to sexual resources.
It might also be that we just feel attracted to the most sexually viable woman in the set available to our perception, or the woman who has exaggerated examples of features that connote fertility among woman. But this answer is not suitable to the trend now, and so seems facile, and unfruitful.
For Pinker, growing up around all that culture makes everything excess, like rape is all about cultural patriarchy, or crime comes from racism and poverty, it is natural that his swing to the other side would be excessive.
For my Phys Anth professor, though, the situation is different. Now that this perspective dominates, it is heading into it's phase of over application. And, for a young academic, there is need to produce work that understands the truth of human nature as the leading minds understand it. Respecting your professors, wanting to get their approval, wanting to succeed in that academic endeavor that you are unlikely to contemplate at a structural level, and wanting to smash the false idols of the receding generation all lead to reproducing the latest big idea that the mainstream of academia is grasped by.
Into the big idea, the universe must be crammed. The renaissance saw a lot of new machines and tecnhology, and gave us the start of Mechanism, around the time of the disovery of electricity and modern chemistry, we got vitalism. Then, Hegel, Marx, and Bentham started thinking about how the big thing determines the small thing, and that led, eventually, to the Blank Slate.
Now we are back to human nature again, and this time the argument is leaning towards a positive view of human nature.
I don't think we will see everyone adopting the obvious implication of evolution by natural selection: what we call good is just what was once adaptive. The choice is only to inhibit or encourage tendencies brought about by our evolution. There is no final morality, no safety in human nature. Sometimes dolphins might rescue humans, but it is more common for us humans to slaughter dolphins. That is our nature. Charity is also human nature. We can choose life affirming values, but we are nowhere compelled to do so.
Biological and genetic data is useful. Constructing our evolutionary heritage is a noble endeavor, and the results fill me with awe. But, Pinker and the rest will not get away with merely fighting for a respect of the actual evolved tendencies of humans. They will not escape the expanding canvas of the big idea.
Our evolved society and social intelligence will not allow this. The tendency in human nature to go too far with an idea, never realizing that it is just one way that we grasp existence, and the tendency to get caught by metaphors, rather than spreading out the data before us, and letting their implications branch out from them in all directions, is a bit hard for us. Especially when we cannot distinguish between research, revelation of causal processes, and the paradigm we imagine to be inherent in them.
Just as the early phrenologists left behind good neurological insights, so too will the present academic fashion queens continue to produce mountains of brilliant explanations and data.
Let's hope they can get to a point where the prevalence of metaphor, it's evolution, and it's non-binding, limited character can be found in the workings of Social Biological brains. Let us get to the point where we can grab the big idea by the root and pin it down in our neurological processes, rather then just letting it morph and carry us away elsewhere.
Further, I hope we can get to the day when we replace Sociobiology with Biological Socialism.
Sociobiology will inevitably lead to prescriptive forces, both among academics and the intermediary levels of society, ending in popular culture. It has already done so. But I hope that they are able to grasp the ultimately structurally prescriptive character of their endeavor.
Likely, they will just continue to teach the naturalistic fallacy and miss it's application to their metaphor hijacked minds.
But back to my recent Physical Anthropology class, we learned of a theory that says rape is among us because it allowed some people to impregnate woman. This coincides with the idea that behaviors are adaptations, and thus must have contributed to our survival, since we exhibit them.
It cannot be only me that automatically senses the proximity to tautology that this line of reasoning indicates.
Can you see the flaws in this?
Well, lets break down it a little:
Behaviors that are persistent among humans have persisted, therefore they must have helped in our evolution. If they hadn't helped us reproduce, those humans that had them would have failed to pass on their genes and would have died out. Every behavior? What does each behavior correspond to? A set of genetic expressions of proteins that comprise muscle, neural, glandular tissue?
Well, since we haven't quite worked all that out, we must instead rely on statistical correlation. And statistical correlation in regards to human behavior, and it's underlying psychological manifestation, is hard to be anything other than over simplification. There are so many factors to correlate with so many other factors, that you are better off delving into the messy, hard to access human mind.
Rape, of course, might be caused by any number of factors, but when you spend all your time discussing behavior in terms of natural selection, neglecting to account for any behavior through natural selection is likely to make you uncomfortable.
It is perfectly reasonable to assume that some behaviors were not adaptive and just results of other adaptations, or what Richard Dawkins calls 'misfires', where one tendency results in another tendency that is not adaptive.
According to the rape as adaptive idea, we want to rape people because our ancestors evolved this trait, which then made them more successive at reproducing.
But what I noticed about the authors of the rape book, and my professor, is that they seemed utterly ignorant and unaware of the issue of psycology in regards to rapists. If you are dealing with a rapist and want to know why he did it, you have to imagine what it's like to be him. And that's an imperfect endeavor, and it's accuracy is hard to guage.
But we can at least see that to violate someone's will in such a blatant manner requires a lack of empathy and, likely, a process of dehumanization of the victim.
When you are hurting someone, particularly when they are physically and verbally imploring you to stop, you have to justify continuing. Moreover, in rape, you see patterns of going after victims who are perceived as weak. The rapist, who is said in that book to be genetically predisposed as part of his drive to procreate, is likely to be full of rationalizations.
I doubt you will find anyone familiar with rapists, and rape cases who has come to the conclusion that "These men are basically normal guys with just this one abnormal disposition."
Rape coincides with some pretty messed up psychology. And when you have guys come along, who are experts in genetics, evolution, and biology, who just happen to have come to the conclusion that there own pigeon hole is where the real answer lies, you have to wonder if they've ever really imagined what it would be like to be a rapist, or looked at profiles and case studies that show the minds of rapists.
And, this is somewhat tangential to the rape-is-in-the-genes guys. They are primarily reacting against the rape-is-in-the-society guys. I remember hearing the 'rape is not about sex' line when I was a teenager. For me, it was obvious that this was some sort of rhetorical device, and that what it must really mean is that rape is mostly about violence.
It is disconcerting to find that these old people, full of knowledge and infused with the will to dominate through research, are so flat in their thinking.
Between genes and behavior there is a wide space called the mind, which is full of layers upon layers of meaning.
Between culture and behavior there is a wide space called subjective experience, which is likewise full of myriad messages, signals, leanings, and decisions.
I cannot help but suspect that these Genes/Society determinists have been divided from their own mind's by the needs of public debate, the demands of scientific-type evidence, and academic authority.
Rather than enjoying the indefinite contemplation of their galaxies of internal being, they identify to closely with the exactness of scientific method, and imagine themselves to be simple and determined by evidence.
Nonetheless, I look forward to the future revelations of the current paradigm. I like Pinker's The Language Instinct. I am less satisfied with The Blank Slate and what I have heard from Dennet about Breaking the Spell, but it's important to understand and process his arguments. I love everything by Dawkins. I really want to read The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton.
Hopefully, as neurology advances, we may eventually get to psychology.
No comments:
Post a Comment