E. O. Wilson and The Darwinian Nationalist Conservatism of Nicholas Wade

WILSON'S SOCIOBIOLOGY

                                                     Edward Wilson in 2003 (Died in 2021)

On May 28, 1975, the front page of the New York Times featured a long article by Boyce Rensberger entitled "Sociobiology: Updating Darwin on Behavior."  It was about Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: A New Synthesis.  Although the book was not to be published by Harvard University Press until the end of June, Rensberger reported that scientists who had heard about the book or who had seen advance copies of it were excited by this new field of study--sociobiology as the study of the biological basis for social behavior in all species, including human beings.  Most exciting was "the revolutionary implication that much of man's behavior toward his fellows, ranging from aggressive impulses to humanitarian inspirations, may be as much a product of evolution as the structure of the hand or the size of the brain."

Over the summer and fall of 1975, the reviews of the book, in newspapers, popular magazines, and science journals, were almost uniformly laudatory.  For example, the reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, proclaimed: "Actually the book may be regarded as an evolutionary event in itself, announcing for all who can hear that we are on the verge of breakthroughs in the effort to understand our place in the scheme of things" (John Pfeiffer, "Sociobiology," July 27, 1975, p. 4).

But then, in November, The New York Review of Books published a passionate denunciation of Wilson's book signed by 15 members of the "Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People," who were mostly academics in the area of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Some of them were academic colleagues of Wilson at Harvard--such as Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Stephen Gould, and Ruth Hubbard.  They attacked Wilson for being a genetic determinist who provided "a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex."  They accused him of reviving the genetically deterministic theories of eugenics and genetic racism that had "provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany" (Elizabeth Allen et al., "Against 'Sociobiology,' November 13, 1975, pp. 182, 184-86).

A few months later, 35 members of the Sociobiology Study Group elaborated their critique of Wilson in the journal Bioscience.  Again, they criticized him for advancing a biological determinism that would justify existing human societies like the United States as rooted in "human nature."  They saw this as manifesting a "deeply conservative politics" that denied the possibility of "social change."  

Determinists assert that the possibility of change in social institutions is limited by the biological constraints on individuals.  But we know of no relevant constraints placed on social processes by human biology.  There is no evidence from ethnography, archaeology, or history that would enable us to circumscribe the limits of possible human social organization.  What history and ethnography do provide us with are the materials for building a theory that will itself be an instrument of social change (E. Allen et al, "Sociobiology--Another Biological Determinism," BioScience no. 3 [March 1976]).

Although they did not identify what kind of "social change" they wanted, most of the members of the Sociobiology Study Group could be identified as ultra-leftists.  Some of them--like Richard Lewontin--identified themselves as "Marxist biologists" who shared "a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just--a socialist--society" (R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature [New York: Pantheon Books, 1984], p. ix.).  This would explain why they wanted "no relevant constraints placed on social processes by human biology" that might hinder the achievement of a socialist society.

Wilson responded to these critics with two arguments.  He denied that he was a genetic determinist.  And he denied that his sociobiology supported a reactionary politics of oppression.

To say that "human nature is to some extent genetically influenced" is not genetic determinism, he argued.  While denying that human nature is "infinitely malleable," he also denied that it is "completely fixed."  Because "the truth appears to lie somewhere in between, closer to the environmentalist than to the genetic pole."  Consequently, one of the pervasive themes of Wilson's sociobiology became the need to understand the coevolution of genes and culture.

On the question of the significance of human sociobiology for political thought, Wilson warned the Science for the People group that their insistence that cultural determinism was unconstrained by human nature would remove all barriers to oppressive rule by the most powerful people in a culture.  Wilson even quoted leftist Noam Chomsky as making this point: "If people are, in fact, malleable and plastic beings with no essential psychological nature, then why should they not be controlled and coerced by those who claim authority, special knowledge, and a unique insight into what is best for those less enlightened?"

Wilson's solution to this problem was to claim that human resistance to oppression can be grounded in those human rights that are rooted in human nature.

To the extent that the biological interpretation noted here proves correct, men have rights that are innate, rooted in the ineradicable drives for survival and self-esteem, and these rights do not require the validation of ad hoc theoretical constructions produced by society.  If culture is all that created human rights, as the extreme enviornmentalist position holds, then culture can equally well validate their removal (Wilson, "Academic Vigilantism and the Political Significance of Sociobiology," Bioscience 26 [March 1976]: 183, 187-190).

But then what is it about evolved human nature that supports these natural rights?  In Sociobiology, Wilson pointed to the "emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain," which generate the moral emotions such as anger, indignation, guilt, shame, gratitude, sympathy, and love that enforce our human sense of rights and duties (pp. 3, 120-21, 129, 547-75).  Some years later, in his book Consilience: The Unity of Science (New York: Norton, 1998), Wilson saw his evolutionary explanation of morality as a revival of the idea of moral sentiments as developed by David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and Edward Westermarck (pp. 172-80, 238-40, 248-56).

I have argued that we should see Darwin, Westermarck, and Wilson as the three evolutionary waves of Adam Smith’s liberal moral theory, because each of them initiated a new turn in the evolutionary moral psychology that has confirmed and deepened Smith’s liberal theory of the moral sentiments.  I have identified this as a liberal moral theory for three reasons.  It assumes a liberal individualism that recognizes the natural separateness of individuals and the moral claims that individuals make.  It asserts the liberal no-harm principle of justice as a “negative virtue” that hinders individuals from any unprovoked harming of others.  And it employs the liberal idea of society as a largely self-regulating and spontaneous order arising from the social interaction of individuals seeking to satisfy their individual desires.

WADE'S DARWINIAN NATIONALIST CONSERVATISM

                                                                         Nicholas Wade

The first prominent published defense of Wilson's sociobiology against the Sociobiology Study Group was by Nicholas Wade writing in the journal Science, where he was a staff writer and editor.  He accused the members of the Study Group of distorting Wilson's book, particularly on the question of genetic determinism.  Far from being a genetic determinist, Wade observed, Wilson had sad that "the genes have given away most of their sovereignty," and that perhaps no more than 10 percent of social behavior has a genetic basis.

Wade also charged the Study Group with engaging in personal attacks and inflammatory political rhetoric--such as associating sociobiology with Nazism--that might scare people away from investigating this new field of human sociobiology (Wade, "Sociobiology: Troubled Birth for New Discipline," Science 191 [March 19, 1976]: 1151-1155). 

And yet Wade himself was not deterred from such studies, because he has written a series of books on the evolution of human nature as the foundation of human social life.

In 2014, his book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, provoked a fierce controversy, perhaps even as fierce as the earlier debate over Wilson's Sociobiology, or the debate in 1994 over Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.  I have written about these debates over Wade's Troublesome Inheritance and Herrnstein and Murray's book.  The emotional intensity of these controversies is due to the fact that these books challenge a fundamental assumption of the modern social sciences--that human social behavior, in both its uniformity and diversity, is largely if not entirely shaped by culture rather than biology.

Wade stated his main idea in one sentence that he repeated many times: "human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional" (4).  More fully stated, he argued:

that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races [sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, East Asians, Australian and New Guinean aborigines, and American Indians] and others [including ethnic groups such as the Ashkenazi Jews]; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations (242).

As you can imagine, this provoked vehement scorn, particularly among academic intellectuals, because it seemed to promote biological racism, although Wade denied this.

Now, in a new book--The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations (New York: Harper, 2025)--Wade renews his argument for the evolution of human nature as shaping social and political life, but he says almost nothing about race (although he does say a lot about ethnicity)--perhaps to avoid the nasty attacks that he stirred up in 2014.

But like Wilson, Wade in his new book continues to challenge "the ideology of the ultra-left" and particularly "the ultra-left's prohibition on applying Darwin's theory to people" (p. 215).  His reader might infer from this that he is defending conservative or right-wing politics, just as Wilson's left-wing critics thought he was promoting a "deeply conservative politics."  

Wade denies that this is the case.  But his denial is ambiguous and evasive.  Consider this one long passage:

The survival behaviors that evolution has built into the human genome--sex differences, family formation, pro-natalism, the religious instinct, tribalism/nationalism--sound very much like conservative values.  Does this mean that evolution is somehow a validation of conservative politics?  Not really.

Evolution conserves survival behaviors that have worked in the past.  It's a process that can only look backward, not forward.  Conservatism also values behaviors and traditions that have worked in the past.  The two systems inevitably overlap.  Moreover, many conservative values, such as love of family and country, are universal and shared by liberals as well.  It's just that conservatives place a greater emphasis on these traditional principles.

But human societies cannot stay the same.  Not only must they adapt to the impositions of a changing environment, but they are also in fervent competition with one another.  Politics has to promote and govern change as well as the conservation of values and traditions.  The evolutionary perspective provides no basis for favoring conservative over liberal politics.  It establishes only that certain values, widely held even if more firmly emphasized by conservatives, are the pillars that support the structure of human societies (p. 211).

Wade's readers should read that over a second time.  They might then ask themselves, if "the pillars that support the structure of human societies"--the pillars "built into the human genome" by evolution--are "more firmly emphasized by conservatives," doesn't that mean "that evolution is somehow a validation of conservative politics"? 

Moreover, if his readers notice how heavily Wade relies on the arguments of Yoram Hazony--particularly, in his book The Virtue of Nationalism--who is the leading theoretician of "national conservatism," they will have to infer, as I do, that Wade is promoting a Darwinian nationalist conservatism (pp. 161, 172, 210, 226).

Now since I have written a book entitled Darwinian Conservatism, and since that's also the title of this blog, you might think that I would be in total agreement with Wade.  I do agree with most of what he says.  But I can't agree with him on every point.

My Darwinian conservatism is a Darwinian liberal conservatism.  Or, as I sometimes say, a Darwinian Lockean liberalism or classical liberalism.

Consequently, I disagree with Wade's Darwinian nationalistic conservatism on some important points.  For example, while Wade argues that the social cohesion of a nation requires ethnic homogeneity or at least a dominant ethnicity, I believe that a free society can allow for a multiethnic nation.  And while Wade believes that social cohesion requires highly restrictive immigration to favor the native culture of the nation, I believe that a free society benefits from largely open borders that allows immigrants to "vote with their feet" for freedom.

Also, I don't worry as much as Wade does about declining fertility rates leading to the extinction of the human species.   I see this as an evolutionary reproductive strategy in which parents in the richer and more developed nations can decide to invest more resources in fewer children so that those children are more likely to be successful.  After all, the explosive growth of the human population over the past 200 years to 8.3 billion doesn't suggest that human extinction is coming anytime soon.  And as long as countries like the United States are open to immigration, they will continue to have growing populations.

I will elaborate these points in my next post.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Goldstein's Mattering Instinct

 

                                               "What's It All About?" Cartoon by Patrick Hardin

The General Diagram for Eric Chaisson's Course on "Cosmic Evolution," Available at His Website.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism that I have defended on this blog supports Goldstein's theory of the mattering instinct in four ways.  

The Darwinian evolution of life explains life's self-mattering as resistance to entropy.  Lockean evolutionary psychology explains the human mattering instinct as rooted in self-ownership and religious enthusiasm.  The Lockean evolutionary psychology of morality explains the multiplicity of mattering projects as different rankings of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  Finally, Darwinian Lockean Liberalism explains how we can rightly condemn some mattering projects as immoral when they assume that mattering is a zero-sum game in which there is not enough mattering to go around.

LIFE'S SELF-MATTERING AS RESISTANCE TO ENTROPY

Patrick Hardin's cartoon shows the biological evolution of complex systems (from the less to the more complex) among vertebrate forms of life--from fish to primates to humans.  Eric Chaisson's diagram shows the cosmic evolution of complex systems from shortly after the Big Bang to the present, which includes purely physical systems as well as biological and cultural systems.  The common underlying theme is the ascent from simple disorder to complex order, or rising complexity.

That ascent to ever more complex order might seem to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics--the Second Law of Thermodynamics--which is the principle that in any natural process, the entropy (the disorder) of the Universe increases, so that energy naturally flows from hotter to colder systems, and not the reverse.  So, for example, a pot of hot soup will tend to cool off over time until it has the same temperature as the surrounding environment; and it will not spontaneously reheat itself.  Similarly, a house of cards will tend to collapse with time; and we can't expect a random collection of playing cards to assemble itself spontaneously into some ordered structure.

But this is true only for "closed systems" in which there is no flow of energy from outside the system.  In "open systems," a flow of energy from outside the system can create and maintain order in the system, and thus resist the tendency to entropy.  You can heat up the pot of soup on a stove.  And you can build a house of cards.  In both cases, you are introducing energy from outside the system to counter the tendency to entropy.  In the one case, you are turning up the gas or electrical heat from the stove.  In the other case, you are exerting your energy in building the house of cards.

The same is true for creating and maintaining the complex order of any system against the tendency to disorder--there must be a flow of energy from outside the system that sustains the order of the system.  And so life on Earth depends on capturing energy (mostly from the Sun through photosynthesis) that can be put to work in sustaining the complex systems of life and resisting entropy.  Animals capture the energy of sunlight through eating and digesting food, and through respiration, animals employ oxygen to release the energy in carbohydrates.  But while being alive is to be in resistance to entropy, eventually entropy wins, and everything that lives must die.

This explains why some evolutionary psychologists have said that "the Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology" (Tooby, Cosmides, and Barrett 2003).  Darwinian natural selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to the entropic loss of functional organization.  Organisms with anti-entropic mechanisms that sustain functional organization are more likely to survive and reproduce than organisms that fail to resist entropy.  

For organisms with brains, natural selection will favor psychological mechanisms that resist entropy.  As indicated in Hardin's cartoon, all vertebrates will have psychic mechanisms that incline them to "eat, survive, reproduce"--or better stated, each animal will prioritize its own eating, surviving, and reproducing, which is what Goldstein identifies as the organic message of self-mattering--every organism acts as if its own existence in this world, its persistence and flourishing, matters.  In organisms with brains, with some capacity for mental attention, this self-mattering drives them to acquire information about their environment and to seek out sources of free energy needed to resist entropy, while also avoiding threats to their existence that might hasten their death.

Chaisson's "Epic of Evolution" shows how the Second Law of Thermodynamics Is Also the First Law of Cosmic Evolution.  The ascent of the Cosmos over almost 14 billion years through eight epochs--the Particulate, the Galactic, the Stellar, the Planetary, the Chemical, the Biological, the Cultural, and the Future--moves from simpler systems to more complex systems.  At each level of complexity, these systems require a flow of energy available to work to sustain their complex order against the thermodynamic tendency to disorder.

Chaisson argues that this correlation between energy and complexity allows us to use "energy rate density" as the universal metric of complexity for all complex systems--from physical systems to biological systems to cultural systems.  Energy rate density is defined as "the amount of energy passing through a given system per unit time per unit mass" (Chaisson 2006:293).  This can be quantified as the number of ergs per second per gram (erg/s/g).  

By this measure, human beings are more complex than stars like the Sun because the energy rate density for a human being is much higher than for the Sun.  And within human beings, their brains are one of the most complex systems in the Universe.  Although our brain occupies only about two percent of our body's mass, our brain uses almost twenty percent of our body's total energy intake because of the high metabolism required to maintain the electrical activity of about 86 billion neurons with about 100 trillion synaptic connections (Chaisson 2006:295).

Although Goldstein does not cite Chaisson's work, she agrees with his central idea about energy rate density as the metric of complexity: "All life, all flourishing, depends on capturing energy (from sunlight or food) and applying it in local anti-entropic resistance.  And the more complicated the system, then the more ways for it to be disordered, and hence the more resistance required.  Again, our brains are the most complicated objects yet discovered in the universe and, not coincidentally, require a lot of energy" (57).

THE HUMAN MATTERING INSTINCT AS ROOTED IN SELF-OWNERSHIP OR DIVINE OWNERSHIP

The unique complexity of the human brain has created an emergent difference in kind from other animal brains, such that human beings are unique in their mattering instinct.  Every animal is driven by an organic mandate that ensures it matters to itself--that it pays attention to itself and to what it needs to do to secure its survival and flourishing.  But we human beings are the only animals for whom it is not sufficient that we subjectively feel that we matter to ourselves, because we must persuade ourselves that we truly objectively deserve to matter.

In persuading ourselves that we truly matter, we must appeal to one of two kinds of the mattering instinct of our evolutionary psychology--one grounded in divine ownership and the other grounded in self-ownership.  The natural human experience of religious transcendence--of being possessed by religious enthusiasm--can persuade us that we belong to God because He created us to serve His purposes, and therefore we matter because we matter to God.  In that case, we are transcenders on Goldstein's Mattering Map.

Or the natural human experience of self-ownership can persuade us that since we naturally own ourselves--our bodies and our minds--we are naturally free to pursue whatever conception of happiness or human flourishing that is best suited to our individual temperament, circumstances, and talents, and therefore our life matters because we are striving for some kind of moral or intellectual excellence in our life.  In that case, we are either socializers, heroic strivers, or competitors on the Mattering Map. 

 

In his Second Treatise, Locke seems to support the transcenders by grounding his law of nature in the "workmanship" of God in creating human beings:

The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches al Mankind, who will be consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions. For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's Pleasure. And being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours (para. 6).

Locke believed that the workmanship argument would require a rational theology that could prove the existence of God.  From “the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational creatures,” we would have to infer “the idea of a supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are."  Through an anthropomorphic analogy, we could project from the idea of our own minds and other human minds the idea of a Divine Mind.  Thus, man would create God in man’s image.  But then Locke admitted that having the idea of God in one’s mind does not prove God’s real existence (ECHU, IV.3.18; IV.3.27; IV.10.1; IV.10.7; IV.10.19; IV.11.1).

Similarly, some evolutionary psychologists—such as Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering--have argued that the natural evolution of religious belief is rooted in the propensity of the human mind to detect rational agency in humans and other animals and then to infer a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to that of human minds.  But this anthropomorphic analogy between human and divine minds is dubious, and even if this explained the natural evolution of the idea of God in the human mind, that would not prove the existence of God.

This led Locke to conclude that believing in the existence of God is ultimately not a matter of reason but of faith.  And since “faith is not knowledge,” we cannot know what the true religion is (Locke, 1870, pp. 94-96; 1997, pp. 248-50; ECHU, IV.17-18). 

Since he doubted that reason could prove God’s existence in support of the workmanship argument, Locke developed the self-ownership argument that would provide a purely natural ground for his law of nature.  He wanted to appeal to a rational theology of divine workmanship, but if that failed, he could fall back onto his natural self-ownership argument.  These two tracks—God and nature--are suggested by Locke’s repeated appeals to “the Laws of God and Nature” (FT, 56, 124; ST, 60, 66, 90, 93, 142, 195).  The “fixed and permanent rule of morals” could be “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature,” and human nature could be understood as created by “nature or God” (1997, p. 125).  Notice that the creative source of human nature is nature or God.

Locke affirms individual self-ownership in his chapter on property in the Second Treatise:

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (para. 27)

From all which it is evident, that though the things of Nature are given in common, yet Man (by being Master of himself), and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of Property. (para. 44)

Here the foundation of Locke's political philosophy of natural rights is not God's ownership of the world and His rule by natural law, but rather the idea that human beings have natural rights because they are self-owners. Moreover, it is this natural autonomy of human beings, rather than their natural subordination to God, that informs the modern understanding of human rights.

Evolutionary science can show that the evolved psychology of ownership is rooted in self-ownership.  The human brain has an evolved interoceptive sense of owning the body that supports self-ownership and the ownership of external things as extensions of the self-owning self.  In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership.  We can see how this sense of each person’s self-ownership arises in the evolved neuroanatomy of the brain to serve the survival and well-being of the human animal.  We can understand this as expressing interoception—the neural perception of the state of the body.

HUMAN FREEDOM AFFIRMS THE MULTIPLICITY OF MATTERING PROJECTS

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke says that in all of their actions, all human beings are moved to satisfy their natural human desires, and while there are many natural desires--I have identified twenty--they are all part of the human pursuit of happiness.  Human beings differ, however, in how they rank the natural desires.  For example, some human beings rank the natural desire for religious transcendence above all, while others rank the natural desire for intellectual understanding as the greatest pleasure.  So while there is no single summum bonum or highest good for all people, there is a single summum bonum for each person, and the pursuit of that highest good will be that person's mattering project (ECHU, 2.21.31-73).

If every human being is free to pursue his summum bonum, then every person's life matters.  The Lockean liberal regimes promote that freedom.  Countries that rank high on the "Human Freedom Index" tend to be countries that secure the widest pursuit of happiness and the multiplicity of mattering projects.  That is confirmed by the patterns of immigration: generally, people want to leave the less free societies and immigrate to the free societies.  Human beings vote with their feet for freedom.

HUMAN FREEDOM DENIES THE ZERO-SUM MATTERING PROJECTS

And yet a free society cannot tolerate all mattering projects.  It cannot tolerate those immoral mattering projects in which one person's sense of mattering comes from denying the mattering of others.  For example, when Frank Meeink was seventeen-year-old neo-Nazi skinhead, he was sent to prison for three years for kidnapping and torturing a teenage boy whom he believed to be a SHARP (a Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice), and thus a traitor to the neo-Nazi movement.  Meeink's mistake was in thinking that mattering is a zero-sum game in which one person's gain is another person's loss because there isn't enough mattering to go around.

On the contrary, the fundamental moral principle in a Lockean liberal social order is that all lives matter because there really is enough mattering to go around, as Goldstein argues (271-292).  Locke conveyed this thought in Some Thoughts Concerning Education when he advised parents about the importance of instilling the virtue of "civility" in their children, so that they would show "general good will and regard for all people," knowing that we are "not to think meanly of ourselves and not to think meanly of others" (secs. 141, 143).

REFERENCES

Chaisson, Eric. 2006. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos. New York: Columbia University Press.

Locke, John. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, John. 1997. Political Essays. Ed. Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tooby, John, Leda Cosmides, and H. Clark Barrett. 2003. "The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology." Psychological Bulletin 129:858-865.

"We Are Creatures of Matter Who Long to Matter": Goldstein's Mattering Map

                                                                    The Mattering Map

"The Areas of the Continents and Regions Are Determined by Estimations of the Comparative Percentage of Inhabitants" (Goldstein 2026:xiii).  SBNR on the Transcenders continent stands for "spiritual but not religious."  You can click on the image to enlarge it. 

In her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks through the central paradox of the human condition, which she expresses by saying: "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."  

We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us.  And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death.  We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives.  We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.

We have to feel that we matter if we are to feel our lives worth living.  Goldstein observes:

We don't want to live if we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never truly matter.  The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are "I don't matter."  It's no accident that the URL for the US Hotline for Suicide Prevention is https://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org (2).

I have not been able to find this website.  But I have found a suicide prevention organization named "You Matter" at https://www.youmatterawareness.org. 

Previously, I have written about Goldstein's book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.  In that book, she suggests that the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.

But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.

And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.

FOUR CONTINENTS ON THE MATTERING MAP

In her new book, Goldstein identifies these people who rely on religious belief to demonstrate that their lives really matter as "transcenders."  But if you look at Goldstein's Mattering Map, you'll see that transcenders are one of four continents that represent the four kinds of "mattering projects."  These are four ways of answering the question--Do I matter?  The transcenders say, I matter because I matter to the spiritual presence that is the transcendent ground of the universe.  The socializers say, I matter because I matter to others.  The heroic strivers say, I matter because I can achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area of striving.  The competitors say, I matter because I matter more than others.

Each of those four continents is divided into regions that represent subgroups within each category.  The different kinds of transcenders correspond to different religious movements, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.  The socializers differ in the people they identify as the others to whom they matter: so, for example, some socializers want to matter to their friends and lovers, while others want to be famous and thus matter to many people who are not known to them.  Heroic strivers differ in their chosen areas of achievement--intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical.  Finally, competitors differ as to whether they compete as individuals against other individuals or as members of a social group against other groups. 

Notice that most of the transcenders continent is covered by the "Axial Age" religions identified by Karl Jaspers--the major religious traditions that originated in roughly the same period, from 800 to 200 BCE (202-206).  The "folk/traditional" category would include shamanism, the original evolutionary seed of all religious experience.

Goldstein claims that since the Axial Age, for "much of our history," almost all human beings have been transcenders.  The ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) introduced a "secular approach" to mattering, which was lost during the Middle Ages, but then renewed by modern secular philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke (204-205).

Notice that the dimensions of the four continents suggest that about one-third of human beings today are transcenders, while two-thirds are not.  And of those that are not transcenders, about half are socializers, who think they matter because they matter to others.

FOUR PEOPLE WHO MATTER

Goldstein fills in her Mattering Map with narratives of the lives of people who represent the different kinds of mattering projects.  So, for instance, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is an example of a transcender.  For a long time, he worried about the insignificance of his life in the cosmos: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified."  But then, in one night, he had a mystical experience of being in the presence of God and Jesus Christ.  He wrote down some notes about his experience on a scrap of paper, in which he concluded: "Let me never be separated from Him.  He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet.  Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.  Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth.  May I not forget your words.  Amen" (200-201).  From that moment, he knew that his life mattered because he mattered to God--the divine creator of the infinite immensity of spaces that had previously terrified him.

Angela Rubino is an example of a socializer who found the purpose of her life when she became a cult follower in Trump's Make America Great Again movement in 2020.  She lives in Rome, Georgia, in the congressional district represented by Majorie Taylor Greene.  Before 2020, she had never felt that she mattered as a citizen.  But then she became captivated by Donald Trump because he seemed to be speaking for her.  She became one of the leading political activists for the MAGA movement in Georgia.  She was determined to find evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraudulent vote counting.  She was sure that the county election board in Rome had destroyed many of the ballots cast for Trump.  So one night, she jumped into the dumpster outside the election board office.  She found two plastic bags crammed with paper shavings.  She took the bags back to her home where she tried to put the strips of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle that would show voting ballots for Trump that had been shredded.

She said that her being part of the MAGA movement made her feel "recognized and even important" for the first time in her life.  She had found her purpose.  She said that her wondering about the purpose of her life began when she was eight years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother's car on the way to a religion class.

The thought just came into my head.  I was thinking, "What are we doing this for?  What are we doing any of this for if we're just going to die?  You die, and it's over.  So, what's the point?"  I felt afraid.  Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.

Speaking to a journalist with the Washington Post, she confessed:

Sometimes I'm like, what if I'm wrong?  It crosses my mind.  Then I ask God: If I'm doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out.  Because I really want to understand what the point is.  This can't be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home.  That as humans, we're nothing (19-20).

Goldstein quotes this as showing the most melancholic thing about the longing to matter--we can never be sure that we have chosen the right way to make our lives matter.  But even if we can't conclusively know that we matter, we must somehow appease the longing to matter--perhaps by becoming a political cult follower--if we are to get on with our lives. 

William James is an example of a heroic striver whose striving was for intellectual achievement in philosophy and psychology.  But for many years as a young man, James could not identify the project that would make his life worth living, and consequently, he fell into long periods of persistent depression.  He suffered such a disgust for life that he would lie in bed for days contemplating suicide.  In 1860, at the age of 18, he became interested in art, and he spent a year studying with the prominent artist William Morris Hunt.  But he decided art was not his calling, declaring, "Nothing is more contemptible than a mediocre artist."  In 1861, at age 19, he entered Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard.  But after three years there, without getting a degree, he switched over to the Harvard Medical School in 1864, at age 22.  He received his medical degree in 1869, at the age of 27.  But he never practiced medicine.  And shortly after leaving the Medical School, he fell back into a severe depression, in which he felt a "horrible fear of existence" (127-132).

Finally, in 1872, at age 30, he began to teach at Harvard, first teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, and later teaching psychology and philosophy.  At that point, it seemed that he had found his life's calling, although he continued to endure occasional bouts of depression.  The publication of his book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890 made James the founder of American psychology.  The publication of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in 1902 made him the first evolutionary psychologist of religion.  The publication of his book, Pragmatism, in 1907 made him one of the founders (along with Charles Sanders Peirce) of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy.  

These intellectual achievements arose from his conviction that he could decide what matters in life, and in that decision he could make his own life matter.  As he once said, he could "believe in my individual reality and creative power."  Or, as he said in his lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?": "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

                                   Frank Meeink Tells His Story--From Neo-Nazi to Faithful Jew

Frank Meeink is an example of a group competitor who thought that his life mattered because he belonged to a neo-Nazi group of white supremacists who mattered more than the targeted groups--particularly, Blacks and Jews--whom he hated.  He grew up in the brutal neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where he faced daily violence not only on the streets but in his home, where his stepfather regularly beat him and called him a retard.

Then, at age 14, spending a summer with relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he came under the influence of a cousin who was a neo-Nazi skinhead, who persuaded him to join a white supremacist group.  Later, he explained:

They knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shit about me.  The Lancaster County white supremacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become.  Then they told me I had a destiny.  They told me I could become a warrior.  They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered. . . . For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered (261).

By the end of the summer, he had earned the red shoelaces in his combat boots by having shed blood.  When he returned to Philadelphia, he organized his own neo-Nazi group, and he became a charismatic leader.  But at one point, he had so many warrants out on him that he was sure he would be soon arrested.  So he left Philadelphia, and eventually ended up in Springfield, Illinois, where he organized a skinhead group.  

But then, at age 17, when he was convicted of kidnapping and torturing another teenager, he was incarcerated for three years.  In jail, he became friends with two Black inmates.  When he was released, he found that he could no longer hate Blacks.

Out of prison, he was looking for jobs, but someone with his record had dismal prospects for employment.  He was so desperate that he took a job with a Jewish antique dealer in New Jersey who needed someone to move his heavy merchandise.  But when it came time to be paid, the boss was not around.  Frank assumed that the Jew was going to jew him out of his pay--because he had heard people talking about jewing as what you should expect from a Jew.  But instead, his boss paid him a little extra for his good work and offered him a full-time job.  Now Frank could no longer believe the stereotypes about Jews.

One day, Frank accidently broke a piece of valuable furniture.  He apologized for being so "stupid."  But his boss became angry that he so often called himself stupid.  He told Frank: "Listen hard to what I'm saying.  Smart people can fake being dumb, but dumb people can't fake being smart.  You are just smart.  Get used to it."

Those words had a powerful effect.  When Frank quotes these words today, he tears up.  That was the beginning of his transformation.  He explains: "When people started to talk to me like I was a fellow human, it changed everything.  We have to start talking.  It's human beings being human beings among human beings."

He became a cofounder of "Love After Hate," an organization that helps to rehabilitate people who have been members of hate groups.  An avid hockey fan and player, he organized "Harmony Through Hockey," associated with the Philadelphia Flyers, to teach kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, from different racial groups, to play together on a team.  He has also lectured widely about his life.  And he has testified before the U.S. Congress about the threats coming from white supremacist groups--particularly, the police brutality that comes from neo-Nazis who have joined police departments.  

So at that point, Frank's self-mattering came from his moral activism against racist hate groups.  He had changed his location on Goldstein's Mattering Map--moving from being a group competitor to being an ethical heroic striver.

But then another change in his sense of how his life matters came when he discovered that he was Jewish!  He talked with a rabbi who told him that Meeink was clearly an Ashkenazi Jewish name, and that Frank also looked Jewish.  Frank then discovered that his mother's maternal great-grandmother had been Jewish.  Since Jewish identity is matrilineal by Jewish law, this lineage makes Frank Jewish.

Now, after years of studying Judaism under the instruction of rabbis, Frank has become an observant Jew.  He frequently invokes Ha-Shem, which is a Hebrew word which means the Name.  This is the way observant Jews refer to God to avoid violating the divine commandment against taking God's name in vain.

Now, as Frank goes through his day, he reminds himself to STAY--"stop thinking about yourself"--and instead think about serving Ha-Shem and praying to him at least an hour and a half every day to ask for his guidance.

He has changed his position on the Mattering Map again--he is not just an ethical heroic striver but also a Jewish transcender.

DONALD TRUMP AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE MATTERING MAP 

                               Planned Kim Il Trump Statue at the Trump Presidential Library

Donald Trump is an example of an individualist competitor who thinks that his life matters only if he matters more than anyone else.  That's why he becomes so angry when someone disagrees with him, challenges him, or just doesn't profess to love him as much as he loves himself.  That's why he must hate every person who stands up to him or who does not bow down to him.  That's why he can never have any friends because friends respect one another as equals.

When Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic interviewed Trump a year ago, they asked him if his second term felt different from his first.  He said it did.  "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive--I had all these crooked guys.  And the second time, I run the country and the world."  A few days ago, Parker and Scherer reported that a Trump confidant had told them: "He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live."

Previously, I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism and the belief of his followers that he has been chosen by God.

For Trump, his life matters because he thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live--because he thinks he runs the country and the world--and therefore he matters more than any other human being who has ever lived.

Trump often compares himself with Abraham Lincoln.  But while Lincoln was politically ambitious, his ambition was different from Trump's.  Although Goldstein never mentions Lincoln, he is a good example of a political fame-seeking socializer whose noble ambition makes Trump's juvenile craving for attention look petty by contrast. 

I have written about Lincoln's ambition and his suicidal depression when he thought that his ambitious strivings might never be fulfilled.  For example, at age 32, Lincoln was plunged into one of his deepest bouts of melancholic misery while serving as an Illinois state legislator.  He withdrew into his room in Springfield and stopped attending sessions of the Legislature.  He considered committing suicide, and his friends removed all sharp instruments from his room.  He spoke with his best friend--Joshua Speed--who later reported the conversation to William Herndon:

In the deepest of his depression, he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was what he desired to live for.

22 years later, shortly after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he reminded Speed of this earlier conversation about his ambition for doing something great so that he would be remembered forever, and he told Speed: "I believe that in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."

Lincoln thought his life would matter if he could link his name to the vindication of the American principle of equal liberty by the emancipation of slaves.  Trump thinks his life matters if he can exercise such absolute power over the world that everyone will be forced to pay attention to him.

THE MATTERING OF TRANSCENDERS IS SPECIAL

Goldstein does not rank any of the different kinds of mattering projects as better than the others.  And she warns against the mistake of universalizing one's own mattering project by moving from "this is what most matters to me, if I'm to matter" to "this is what ought to matter to everyone, if they're to matter."  

She does say, however, that the transcenders are special in that "there is no greater sense of mattering than that experienced by transcenders" (193).  She explains:

To be a transcender is to believe that your personal existence has a role to play in the narrative of eternity.  You would not be at all unless you had a role to play in the drama of all of existence.  There is no greater mattering that you can conceive for yourself, short of imagining that you are yourself a transcendent being existing on an exalted plane beyond other mortals--in other words, short of lunacy.  Compared to transcendent mattering, any other sense of mattering limps far behind, which again explains why psychologists keep producing data showing that the religious and spiritual report comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction (197).

What I see here is a suggestion of Goldstein's envy of the transcenders for having a greater sense of mattering than she does.  Or perhaps it's a regret that she lost the transcenders' sense of mattering when she lost her ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith at age fourteen.  As she reports in her book on Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, she attended an ultra-Orthodox all-girls high school, where her favorite teacher--Mrs. Schoenfeld--warned the girls that they must never read Spinoza because he was a Jew who became an atheist.  But then as Mrs. Schoenfeld described his atheistic philosophizing and how the Jewish community in Amsterdam had excommunicated him as a heretic, Goldstein felt an attraction to him: "The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man.  I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld's class, and I felt that I loved him" (47).

Goldstein became a professional philosopher whose sense of mattering comes from her being an intellectual heroic striver who finds her life's purpose in achieving intellectual excellence.  But she still feels some faint longing for that most intense sense of mattering that she once had as an ultra-Orthodox high school girl.

She hinted this in one of her conversations with Frank Meeink:

Frank asked me once about my own Jewish faith and observance.  We were in an Uber returning from the quirky marina where his waterlogged boat is still docked.

When I come clean to him about my lack of religious belief and observance, he gave me his lopsided grin and tells me that it's all okay, but he hopes I know I'm going to hell.  (A joke.  Frank doesn't believe in hell.)

Wait a minute, I say, grinning back.  You of all people have got to believe in redemption.

"Yeah, you're right," he says.  "Me of all people.  I gotta believe in redemption even if it ends up killing me." 

Doesn't their awkward joking about believing in redemption suggest their aching longing for religious transcendence? 

In my next post, I will argue that Darwinian Lockean liberalism supports Goldstein's theory of the Mattering Instinct.

The Lockean Liberalism of King Charles III's Rebuttal of Trump in His Address to Congress

 

King Charles III addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress yesterday.  This is only the second time that a British monarch has spoken to the Congress.  The first was in 1991 when Queen Elizabeth II spoke to Congress during President George H. W. Bush's administration.

The occasion for this speech was to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Remarkably, even though the Declaration was a declaration of war with Great Britain, Charles asserted that the Lockean liberal principles of the Declaration were grounds of agreement between the American and British peoples.  Moreover, he implicitly invoked those principles in attacking Trump's authoritarian rule.

Here's the main theme of his speech:

Ours is a partnership born of dispute, but no less strong for it, so perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our nations are in fact instinctively like-minded--a product of the common democratic, legal, and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day.  Drawing on these values and traditions, time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come together.

He then suggested that those "common democratic, legal, and social traditions" justified checking Trump's power.

Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated, often verbatim, in the American Bill of Rights of 1791.

And those roots go even further back in our history: the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.

I heard this as a tacit reference to Trump's attempts to suspend the right to due process of law that have been challenged in the courts.  We could also hear this as an appeal to the Congress to check Trump's executive power.  

Notice also that in accepting the Declaration of Rights of 1689, Charles III acknowledges the mistake made by Charles I and Charles II in claiming that Rex is Lex--the same mistake made by Trump when he claims "as President, I can do anything I want to do."

Actually, Charles was explicit in reminding Congress that they should have the supreme power in protecting liberty from authoritarian one-man rule.

Distinguished members of the 119th Congress, it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America's founders is present in every session and every vote cast.  Not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States.

Not by the will of one!

Charles also invoked Christianity as one of the social traditions shared by the British and American peoples.

And, Mr. Speaker, for many here--and for myself--the Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration that guides us not only personally, but together as members of our community.

At this point, House Speaker Mike Johnson, sitting behind the King, smiled and shook his head in agreement, which was to be expected considering that he has been so adamant in affirming America to be a Christian nation guided by God's providence.  But while Johnson has denied the Lockean principles of religious toleration and separation of church and state, the King has affirmed those principles--particularly in his coronation three years ago.  He reaffirmed that in his speech by speaking of the need "to value all people, of all faiths, and of none."

The second half of the King's speech was devoted entirely to defending the military alliance of America and Great Britain and the NATO alliance as essential for protecting the principles of liberty and equality and also for securing the freedom of trade and cultural exchange necessary for economic growth.  As part of that argument, the King insisted that "unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people."

The King's speech to Congress was thus a powerful argument against Trump's attempts to break up the military, economic, and cultural alliance of the U.S. with Great Britain and the rest of Europe that has advanced the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.