Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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When A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer hit bookstores early last year, it was greeted by one of the most unfriendly barrages of criticism by intellectuals on the left of any book since The Bell Curve. The book placed rape in the context of its evolutionary history and attempted to explain how one of the most despicable of human acts is actually a genetically developed strategy employed by some men to propagate their genes. Masked behind the many accurate critiques of Thornhill and Palmer’s imperfect science was a much deeper discomfort on the part of many on the left with the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology and its Darwinian explanations of human behavior.

In his short book A Darwinian Left, bioethicist Peter Singer seeks to guide the left towards a new appreciation of evolution and undo the uneasiness with Darwin reflected in the response of so many liberals to works of sociobiology like A Natural History of Rape. Moreover, he hopes to make evolutionary theory the centerpiece of a new ideological approach on the left.

Singer traces the left’s apprehension about applying Darwinian thought to human behavior back to the end of the last century and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism. Spencer’s philosophy that the “survival of the fittest” is a good that should be encouraged can be easily dismissed because it represents what the British philosopher G.E. Moore termed the “naturalistic fallacy,” or the drawing of a value judgment from a factual statement. In other words, evolution is a description of how things are in the natural world, not a prescription for how things ought to be in the moral world. The fallacious deducing of values from facts has ever since been the cardinal sin of evolutionary philosophizing. But if no moral assessment can be drawn from evolution, what could possibly be meant by a Darwinian left or a Darwinian right?

Singer’s argument boils down to this: the left will be better able to achieve its social and political agenda if it acknowledges and incorporates a more accurate understanding of human nature into its worldview. He believes that the best tool we have to unravel the mysteries of our common behavior is sociobiology, and that if the left doesn’t embrace the science and what it can tell us, leftist ideology will necessarily be flawed, perhaps tragically so.

Before explaining exactly which aspects of the left’s worldview might be informed by Darwin, it’s worth pausing a moment to reflect on just what Singer considers “the left” to represent. Singer throws the term around rather casually and hardly wastes any ink considering it. He is quick to equate the left with social egalitarianism and a desire to reduce the vast quantities of pain and suffering in the world—a utilitarian position that conveniently mirrors his own philosophical system. But he neglects to include in his definition of the left the individual rights-oriented philosophies represented by the likes of John Rawls that have also long been part of the liberal tradition. The problem is that the strand of the left that Singer focuses on (he often uses “the left” as a stand-in for Marxism) is far less pertinent today than it once was, while the under-represented liberties-based strand has become increasingly more relevant in recent decades.

“To be blind to the facts about human nature is to risk disaster,” writes Singer. So what does he believe are the left’s major misunderstandings about human nature that Darwin can correct?  First and foremost is the left’s belief in the great plasticity of human behavior. Marxism is based on the notion that human nature is the product of an “ensemble of the social relations” and is therefore highly malleable. This malleability, according to Singer, dominates the left’s worldview and goes back all the way to Locke and his idea of the mind as a “white Paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.”  The standard social science model, which dominates the left’s ideology and owes itself to Locke’s notion of a tabula rasa, views human nature, as Emile Durkheim put it, as “merely the indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms.” In essence, the standard social science model doesn’t believe in an inherent human nature beyond the most rudimentary biological constraints.

The idea of man’s malleability, present in both Marxist ideology and the standard social science model, leads to a belief in the inherent equality of men, and to a faith in education as the great panacea. According to Singer, it is also behind the left’s dream of a perfect human being living in a perfectly utopian society. But, Singer warns, a Darwinian acknowledgement of the many relatively fixed aspects of human nature tells us that man is not perfectible, and neither are his societies. One of the great errors of Marxism was its confidence that hierarchies could be abolished in an egalitarian revolution. Singer believes that if the left had only possessed a Darwinian understanding that the formation of hierarchies is inherent in human nature, the authoritarian horrors of Stalinism might have been prevented.

The thing is, we don’t need Darwin to tell us that when humans are placed in groups, those who have the ability and motivation to rise to the top will do just that. As Singer himself points out on the first page of his book, the nineteenth century anarchist and ideological opponent of Marx, Mikhail Bakunin (among others) recognized this very flaw in Marx’s social egalitarianism without the aid of evolutionary psychology. As Bakunin’s critiques of Marx make apparent, it’s not clear that an understanding of evolution is any more useful than an understanding of literature or history in deconstructing the nature of man.

Evolutionary psychology’s great success has been in explaining how we got to be the way we are, not in explaining the way we are. In fact, in that respect, it is a relatively unhelpful heuristic. Using evolutionary psychology to try to discern human nature is like trying to figure out what a given kind of cake tastes like by taking the backwards approach of mentally constructing it from a list of ingredients and cooking directions. If we have the cake sitting in front of us, this is a useless endeavor. The approach may be able to tell us how the cake got to be yellow and fluffy and coated with icing, but if we want to figure out what it tastes like, we’re better off just digging in with a fork. Anthropology, history, and our collective experiences provide us with plenty of real data from which to construct a view of human nature in the sense that Singer is interested in, so long as we are actually looking for a general human nature. In contrast, a sociobiological perspective is necessarily somewhat speculative.

Of course, sociobiology has helped us to take the first important step of acknowledging that there are some universals to human behavior. But acknowledging this doesn’t preclude malleability. Even the most ardent Darwinists admit that our genes only code for proclivities, not rigid behavioral programs to which we are deterministically bound, and that culture still plays an enormously large role in shaping who we are. As Richard Dawkins has said, “we have the power to turn against our creators.” Our self-consciousness grants us the capability to escape the behavioral bounds of our genes. In other words, the “perfectibility of humankind” (whatever it is Singer means by this) is not impossible, only very difficult.

Another aspect of the left critiqued by Singer is what he sees as its readiness to blame all problems on society. Take for example, the question of cheats, a game-theory term for individuals who do not cooperate with the rules of society. Singer claims that “a pre-Darwinian left would blame the existence of cheats on poverty, a lack of education, or the reactionary capitalist way of thinking.” But Darwin tells us (or at least Singer tells us that Darwin tells us) that cheating, or taking advantage of those who cooperate indiscriminately (so called “suckers” in game theory-speak), is built into our genetic program, and therefore at least partly beyond the control of such vague societal factors as socioeconomic status and education level. This sort of talk ought to make even conservatives cringe. What’s more, it is grounded in a vastly oversimplified understanding of evolutionary theory. Basing his argument on models of game theory, he suggests that, “A Darwinian left [should] realize that… the only permanent solution is to change the pay-offs so that cheats do not prosper. This means not turning the other cheek.” In other words, a Darwinian left will embrace harsher prison sentences for criminals, and perhaps even the death penalty. Singer’s Darwinian left is starting to sound more and more like a Darwinian right.

The last and least coherent part of Singer’s argument deals with the issue at the heart of so much work on evolutionary psychology: the nature of altruism. He believes that part of the left’s reticence about accepting sociobiology with open arms is the Darwinian implication that man is part of a nature “red in tooth and claw,” and therefore inherently competitive and selfish. Singer acknowledges the selfish motives at work in man, but also points to man’s altruistic nature. Using game theory, he shows how cooperation is just as hard-wired into man’s general character as selfishness. His major suggestion is that a Darwinian left should seek to foster the cooperative rather than the competitive instinct in man. Like so many of his other suggestions, this one is remarkable only in the extent of its banality and unhelpfulness. And what’s more, it doesn’t really require Darwin.

And finally, of course, there is the irony that Singer, of all people, is chiding the left for its misunderstanding of human nature. In a New York Times Magazine article from September of 1999, Singer presented his solution to end world poverty. He called for all people to donate to charity that portion of their income which is in excess of the bare minimum needed to lead a basic, healthy existence (Singer defines that as every cent over $30,000). Now, who is it with the warped understanding of human nature?