Krannawitter on Lincoln & Prerogative

This is the third part of my comments on Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln.

Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln initiated military responses without a declaration of war from Congress. He called for 75,000 military volunteers, he expanded the Army and Navy, he withdrew money from the federal treasury without congressional authorization, he ordered a blockade of Southern ports, and he authorized his generals in the field to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. This was the first and only time in American history that the writ of habeas corpus has been suspended. In effect, this meant a suspension of all individual rights, because it meant that military authorities could detain individuals in custody without specifying charges against them. In some cases, this was used against public speakers and newspaper editors who were criticizing Lincoln's policies. According to the libertarian and paleoconservative critics of Lincoln, this shows us clearly that Lincoln was a tyrant.

By contrast, progressive scholars defended Lincoln's exercise of power as benevolent dictatorship. Krannawitter quotes political scientist John Burgess as praising Lincoln as a "prototype of twentieth-century presidential government, ruling through rhetorical leadership of public opinion rather than an adherence to the text and forms of the Constitution" (318).

Krannawitter wants to defend Lincoln against the libertarian and paleoconservative charge of tyranny. But he wants to do this without embracing the progressive idea of "presidential government" outside the Constitution.

Krannawitter's rhetorical strategy is to employ Benjamin Kleinerman's argument that Lincoln properly exercised the "executive prerogative" defended by John Locke. But in doing this, Krannawitter never explains clearly how such Lockean prerogative can be compatible with American constitutionalism. In the British tradition of the divine right of kings, prerogative was at the core of the kingly power to act with unlimited discretion outside the rule of law. Challenging prerogative was therefore at the center of the British tradition of republicanism. It was important for the American constitutional framers that the American president should not have any prerogative powers allowing him to step outside the Constitution. On this point, they disagreed with Locke. In 1793, James Madison complained that Locke's "chapter on prerogative shows how much the reason of the philosopher was clouded by the royalism of the Englishman."

In adopting Kleinerman's argument, Krannawitter fails to clearly lay out the possible relationships between emergency powers and the Constitution. There are three possibilities. Emergency powers could be totally outside the Constitution, so that a President in times of emergency steps outside the constitutional framework to do whatever he judges best for the country. Or emergency powers could be inside and outside the Constitution, so that a President might invoke certain provisions inside the Constitution--like his oath of office, for example--as allowing him to step outside the Constitution in times of emergency. Or emergency powers could be totally inside the Constitution, so that the President and other officers of government have only those emergency powers specified in the Constitution itself. (Here I am drawing on some arguments that I have elaborated elsewhere, as in my chapter on Locke in Political Questions.)

Following Kleinerman, Krannawitter seems to take either the outside or the inside/outside position. Against them, I would argue for the totally inside position as the only position compatible with American constitutionalism. And, with the possible exception of one short passage in his Message to Congress of July 4, 1861, I think Lincoln followed the inside position. That is to say, Lincoln generally argued that he was able to meet the emergency of the Civil War by exercising powers specified in the Constitution so that it was not necessary for him to step outside the Constitution. In fact, Lincoln expressly denied that he was exercising "an arbitrary personal prerogative" (quoted by Krannawitter at p. 328).

In The Federalist, Hamilton and Madison argued that the Constitution did not contain, and should not contain, "parchment provisions" contrary to "public necessity." Rather, the national government should be given all the powers necessary for meeting every contingency, so that it would never be necessary in an emergency for officers of government to act outside the Constitution. To do otherwise--to force officers in times of emergency to step outside the Constitution--would set dangerous precedents of extraconstitutional action that would destroy constitutional government.

Lincoln's agreement with this stance is clear in his argument that suspension of the writ of habeas corpus is a clear example of an emergency power specified in the Constitution that makes it unnecessary to step outside the Constitution in an emergency like the Civil War. In Article I, sec. 9, the Constitution declares that "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." This means that the President has the constitutional power to suspend the writ in an emergency if he can show that there is a rebellion or invasion that requires suspension for the public safety. Although this provision is found in Article I, which is predominantly the legislative article of the Constitution, the provision does not specify that this suspension is exclusively a legislative power. Moreover, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, this provision originally was written with the specification that suspension would be "by the legislature." But this phrase was dropped later, leaving it open as to whom was to do the suspension.

Executive prerogative by Locke's definition is the power "to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it." Progressive scholars like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Imperial Presidency have argued that American presidents have Lockean prerogative, which allows them to step outside the Constitution in time of emergency.

Like Kleinerman, Krannawitter adopts the Schlesinger position. It is hard to see how this is consistent with American constitutionalism. Agreeing with Kleinerman, Krannawitter suggests "that it is better for the president to act without law and, in so doing, to explain and defend his actions by speaking openly to the people about the temporary necessities that require such actions" (333). Isn't this exactly what Burgess proposed--"twentieth-century presidential government, ruling through rhetorical leadership of public opinion rather than an adherence to the text and forms of the Constitution"? But doesn't this contradict Krannawitter's earlier claim that he rejects presidential government through rhetorical leadership as a progressivist distortion of Lincoln?

Isn't it contrary to American constitutionalism and the rule of law to suggest, as Krannawitter does, that "it might be less important to ask whether Lincoln's actions were legal or constitutional, and more important to ask if they were necessary to protect the public good" (325)?

The contemporary application of Krannawitter's promotion of presidential prerogative power is suggested by his embrace of John Yoo's defense of Bush's imperial presidency. I see here a disturbing tendency that Krannawitter shares with many of the Straussians towards elevating presidential leadership over the rule of law. This is evident, for example, in Harvey Mansfield's defense of George Bush's "one-man rule" and "imperial ambition" as an expression of the rule of the wise man. My response to Mansfield can be found here.

Krannawitter on Lincoln and Limited Government

This is the second part of my comments on Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln.

The libertarian and paleoconservative critics of Lincoln--people like Thomas DiLorenzo, Charles Adams, Thomas Woods, Walter Williams, Murray Rothbard, and Clyde Wilson--argue that the crucial turn away from limited government and towards modern "big government" came with Lincoln. Following the lead of Harry Jaffa, Krannawitter responds by claiming that Lincoln continued the philosophic and political tradition of limited government coming from the American founding, and that the turn to the modern administrative state that began with the American progressives was a break from Lincoln.

The libertarian and paleoconservative opponents of Lincoln defend the secession of the Southern states as an exercise of a constitutional right essential for limiting the oppressive power of the central government. Therefore, they charge that Lincoln's leadership of the North against the South was an unconstitutional denial of the right of the states to secede.

Krannawitter does a good job of refuting this argument. His main point is the distinction between the natural right to revolution, which Lincoln accepted as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the legal right of secession, which Lincoln denied. The states of the Confederacy could not justify their actions as an exercise of the natural right of revolution, and therefore they had to appeal to some presumed constitutional right of secession. Krannawitter rightly shows that there is little support for such a legal right of secession under the Constitution as ratified in 1789. In fact, the antifederalist opponents of the Constitution complained that the appeal to "We the People" as the ultimate source of national power deprived the states of their sovereignty. In effect, John C. Calhoun and the other proponents of secession were actually antifederalists who were trying to overturn the Constitution that was ratified in 1789.

The weakest part of Krannawitter's argument is that he passes quickly over Madison's Virginia Resolutions and Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which provided the primary evidence for Calhoun's position. Krannawitter's claim is that Madison and Jefferson pulled back from this position after the election of 1800. More needs to be said about this.

The leading proponents of the centralized administrative state of the 20th century--Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Franklin Roosevelt, and others--repeatedly praised Lincoln as pointing the way to the modern expansion of national power. The libertarians and paleoconservatives agree with this rhetorical use of Lincoln for liberal progressivism, but for them, this is a reason to condemn Lincoln as the father of big government.

Krannawitter responds to this by criticizing the progressives for misusing Lincoln, charging that if they had read Lincoln's writings carefully, they would have seen that Lincoln's defense of natural right differed radically from the ideas of historicist progressivism.

Krannawitter agrees that Lincoln led the way to the most massive expansion of federal power in American history up to that point. But he argues that Lincoln understood that this was all a temporary response to the extraordinary emergency of the Civil War that would end with the end of the war. It is true that much of the expansion of federal power under Lincoln was reversed after the war, but Krannawitter leaves the reader wondering why Lincoln should get credit for what happened after his death.

The reader must wonder about this since Krannawitter admits that Lincoln's Whig economic policies--"internal improvements," a national bank, paper currency without backing by gold or silver, and protective tariffs--were not good policies, although these were exactly the policies that the progressives saw as pointing ahead to the administrative state. In the late 1830s, Lincoln supported a massive program of internal improvements in Illinois that led the state government to the edge of financial collapse. Krannawitter prefers to play down Lincoln's economic policies by insisting that after 1854 Lincoln was more concerned with slavery than with economics. But this rhetorical strategy doesn't work if one sees that the issue of slavery was necessarily intertwined with the economic policies associated with "free labor." It might have been better for Krannawitter to compare Lincoln's economic policies with the teachings of Adam Smith and show that most of the governmental policies Lincoln supported--with the exception of protective tariffs--were regarded by Smith as within the proper realm of government.

In my next post, I will take up the debate over Lincoln's exercise of prerogative power.

Krannawitter on Lincoln & Slavery

Much of American political rhetoric turns on the assessment of Abraham Lincoln. Although many consider Lincoln the greatest American president who is the model for American statesmanship, the many critics of Lincoln say this elevated reputation arises from a falsification of history. Some leftists condemn Lincoln as a racist. But Barack Obama and other liberals praise Lincoln and argue that liberal progressivism follows in the tradition of Lincoln. Many libertarians and paleoconservatives denounce Lincoln as a Machiavellian tyrant who destroyed the American tradition of limited government. But some conservatives--particularly, those influenced by Harry Jaffa--insist that Lincoln's statesmanship was founded on the natural right principles of the American founding and provides a model for political reasoning today. The followers of Jaffa say that Lincoln's natural right statesmanship was subverted by the historicism and relativism of modern Darwinian science. But, as I have argued on this blog, this shows an ignorance of the fundamental agreement between Lincoln and Darwin and of how evolutionary science supports "Darwinian natural right."

Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President has just been published by Rowman & Littlefield, and it helps us to think about this debate. Recently, Allen Guelzo's favorable review of the book appeared in The Claremont Review of Books.

This is a good book, perhaps even the best single book for those who want to understand the philosophic character of Lincoln's statesmanship. Although most of the main ideas in the book can be found in the writings of Jaffa, the clarity and precision of Krannawitter's presentation helps the reader to think through the reasoning for Jaffa's account of Lincoln.

I have found this book so intellectually stimulating that I want to offer my comments on the book in a series of posts. I generally am persuaded by most of what Krannawitter says. But I do find some points in his writing either obscure or weak, which I will explain. And yet, even where I disagree with him, I find that he forces me to deepen my thinking.

Of course, what one thinks about Lincoln depends ultimately on one's assessment of his handling of the slavery issue. Krannawitter defends Lincoln's stance on slavery as philosophically and politically correct. To do this, he must respond to many objections. Some critics say Lincoln was a racist. And certainly there are many passages in Lincoln's writings that sound racist--for example, when he says (in his debates with Stephen Douglas) that "there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Krannawitter's response is to argue that although Lincoln believed in the moral and political equality of whites and blacks, he had to employ "an esoteric manner" and "rhetorical strategies" in expressing his beliefs, because as a politician he could not directly challenge the racist opinions of many Americans in his day (18-21).

Although I agree with this, I would like to have seen Krannawitter go more deeply into this. He rightly makes the point that "physical difference" could just mean the obvious difference in skin color, so that Lincoln could be saying that as a matter of sociological observation, blacks and whites will find it hard to live together as equals because of the prejudices of color. But did Lincoln ever use the phrase "physical inferiority" or "inferior races," as Douglas said Lincoln did? The newspaper transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates sometimes use slightly different language for the same speeches. According to the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln in the fifth debate at Galesburg used the phrase "inferior races." According to the Chicago Daily Times, he spoke of "physical inequality." But as far as I can tell, Lincoln uses "physical difference" as his phrase in all the other passages.

Lincoln's "esoteric manner" is perhaps conveyed by what he says in the sixth debate in Quincy: "I am altogether unconscious of having attempted any double dealing anywhere--that upon one occasion I may say one thing and leave other things unsaid, and vice versa; but that I have said anything on one occasion that is inconsistent with what I have said elsewhere, I deny."

In deciding whether Lincoln was a racist or not, the testimony of Frederick Douglass--the eloquent ex-slave abolitionist--would seem to be decisive, because he knew Lincoln and engaged in a continuing debate with him about emancipation. In his Freedmen's Memorial speech of 1876, Douglass spoke of Lincoln as "preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men." Unfortunately, Krannawitter does not quote this part of Douglass's speech. In his vehement attack on Lincoln as a racist, Lerone Bennett does quote this passage. But then Bennett never quotes the passage praising Lincoln's statesmanship: "measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." Douglass also declared: "Measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than was Abraham Lincoln." Although Bennett refers to the Freedmen's Memorial speech as "one of the greatest orations on Lincoln by any African-American," he never quotes any of these passages where Douglass praises Lincoln's statesmanship, because this would subvert Bennett's intemperate denunciation of Lincoln.

Krannawitter rightly emphasizes that Lincoln consistently adhered to the principle that while protecting slavery in the Southern states was a constitutional obligation, prohibiting the expansion of slavery into the Western territories was within the constitutional powers of Congress. I do wish, however, that Krannawitter had noted the one big problem with Lincoln's argument that this was the intent of the Founders--both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison thought that it was unconstitutional for Congress to restrict the Western movement of slavery. It has always been baffling to me that Stephen Douglas didn't bring this up as evidence against Lincoln's position. Krannawitter ignores this point. He refers to Jefferson's remark about the debate over the Missouri Compromise of 1820 being a "fire bell in the night." But he doesn't notice that Jefferson used this phrase in a letter criticizing the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional.

The libertarian and paleoconservative critics of Lincoln often assert that the Civil War was not about slavery at all but about the economic policies of the North in imposing unfair protective tariffs and other economic measures that punished the South. Kannawitter is good in surveying all the evidence showing the falsity of this assertion by showing that the leaders of the secessionist South repeatedly affirmed that protecting slavery was their primary motivation in breaking away. He is especially effective in raising one powerful question, "Why did Southern Democrats oppose Stephen Douglas for the presidential nomination in 1860?" The answer, of course, is that the Southern Democrats split away from the party because Douglas would not guarantee federal protection for slavery in the Western territories even where the majority of the citizens wanted to prohibit slavery.

There's more to come in future posts.

Aristotelian Regime Analysis and Darwinian Group Selection

In Moral Minds, Marc Hauser tries to explain the evolution of human morality from traits shared with other animals. Although he does show how many of the components of human morality can be seen in other animals that cooperate with one another, he recognizes the uniqueness of human cooperation and morality: "We are the only animal that cooperates on a large scale with genetically unrelated individuals and that consistently shows stable reciprocity" (378, 411).

Hauser concludes that explaining the evolution of human morality requires group selection. Here he follows in the tradition of Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man: "It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe . . . an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another." The problem, then, is that a social group cannot succeed unless its members cooperate for the good of the group, and yet within the group, it is almost always advantageous for individuals to become cheaters who advance their selfish interests at the expense of the common good. The solution to the problem arises when competition between groups is more intense than competition within groups. Although selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

While the idea of group selection has been out of favor among most evolutionary theorists over the past 40 years, recently there has been a revival of group selection thinking. David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson have written an article for The Quarterly Review of Biology surveying the recent research supporting group selection and arguing that group selection should provide the theoretical foundation for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. An abridged version of this article appeared in the New Scientist.

My interest here is in considering the common ground between this Darwinian group-selection explanation of human morality and Aristotle's account of political regimes.

As Hauser indicates, other animals show differences between groups based on differing cultural traditions. But with other animals these cultural differences don't carry much emotional weight. With human beings, by contrast, cultural differences carry the weight of competing moral conceptions of what is good and right. Human beings don't just cooperate as do other animals. Human beings cooperate based on explicit recognition of rules and procedures of cooperation that have moral authority. Thus, groups form around distinctive symbolic markers that constitute moral communities based on some shared conception of what is good and right. Human group selection arises from the competition between these symbolically constituted moral communities. With language, cultural group selection can operate on cultural variation.

Similarly, Aristotle saw that human beings were not the only political animals. But he also saw that human beings were more political than other political animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech--logos. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Human beings are the most political animals, it seems, because through speech human beings cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive than is possible for other political animals. Through speech human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" as the criterion of justice. Political communities can be distinguished as different kinds of regime based on how they structure the order of rule to conform to some moral conception of the way of life of the community. A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling faction. The political problem, then, is that although people are naturally inclined to cooperate for a common life, they are also thrown into factional conflict by their selfish desires. In the long run, Aristotle suggests, the more just regimes tend to be more stable because they avoid or at least moderate factional conflict.

Could the Darwinian evolution of morality through group selection be understood as an Aristotelian evolution of regimes? Could we see this in the history of government? Certainly, American statesmen like Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln believed that the modern republican regime based on limited government by consent of the governed, the rule of law, and private property promised a major advance in political history. For Lincoln, the Civil War was a test of whether such a regime, conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality, could long endure. Do we see here a ground for moral progress through the evolutionary group selection of political regimes?

Natural Right and Biology: Marc Hauser on The Moral Instinct

As Leo Strauss showed in Natural Right and History, one can view the entire history of political philosophy as turning on the question of whether there is any natural right. Some people would say there is no natural right, because all right is determined by custom or convention, and what is customarily right or wrong varies radically across different societies and across history. Others would say that despite this variation in customary standards of right, there are some principles of right by nature that are universal, because they are rooted in a universal human nature. As Strauss indicates, in the central section of his book (156-63), Aristotle would seem to be the best exponent of natural right, and yet Aristotle's teaching is unclear. According to Aristotle, in Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, there is something that is right by nature, and yet "all is changeable." How can there be a universal standard of natural right if all conceptions of right are changeable according to variable moral traditions?

Aristotle was a biologist who studied human beings as moral and political animals. One way of explaining his account of natural right is to say that for him natural right is a universal biological propensity of the human species that is diversely expressed in the variable circumstances of individual habituation and social learning. All social animals have natural instincts for social learning. Social life emerges as a joint product of nature and nurture. Just as human beings have a natural instinct for learning language, but the specific languages they learn will depend on their social circumstances, so too do human beings have a natural instinct for judging right and wrong, but the specific content of their moral rules will depend on their social learning.

I have developed this Aristotelian biology of morality and politics in Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (1998), and I have argued there that modern Darwinian science supports this Aristotelian understanding of natural right.

Although Marc Hauser shows no knowledge of Aristotle or the history of political philosophy, Hauser's Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (2006) provides support for my argument. He surveys the recent research on the biological evolution of morality. He concludes that morality is grounded in biology in a manner similar to the biological grounding of language. Human beings are born with a natural capacity for learning language, which Noam Chomsky has explicated as an innate universal grammar, but the specific content of language varies across different languages within the broad constraints of universal grammar. Similarly, Hauser argues, human beings are born with a natural capacity for learning morality, which depends on a universal moral grammar that belongs to the human species as a product of evolutionary history, but the specific expression of that morality will vary across different moral systems within the constraints set by the innate moral instinct.

Last January, The New York Times Magazine published an article by Steven Pinker on "The Moral Instinct," which surveys the reasoning of Hauser and others on the biological roots of morality. I wrote a post on Pinker's article.

Although I generally agree with Hauser's argumentation, I find some of his reasoning vague and confusing. Here I will indicate a few points where I find it hard to follow what he is saying.

In my book Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls, I noted that John Rawls often appealed to conceptions of human nature rooted in evolutionary biology. In particular, he argued that the very capacity for any sense of justice requires a psychological disposition for reciprocity that must have been shaped by human evolutionary history. He also suggested that we might see this innate propensity to morality as analogous to language as understood by Chomsky: there might be an innate moral grammar underlying our moral experience. A few years ago, John Mikhail wrote a philosophy dissertation at Cornell on "Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: A Study of the 'Generative Grammar' Model of Moral Theory Described by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice." Hauser has organized his book around Mikhail's account of the Rawlsian linguistic analogy.

The problem, however, is that in arguing that the moral instincts show the judgments of a "Rawlsian creature," Hauser never explains how this supports Rawls' argument that justice is based on the principles that human beings in the "original position" would choose behind a "veil of ignorance." One of the most controversial of Rawls' principles is the "difference principle" that inequalities in economic resources are permitted only as long as they benefit the least advantaged. When Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer put some people in a laboratory setting with the rules specified by Rawls, they selected principles of justice that were not exactly as Rawls predicted. In particular, they did not embrace the difference principle. They prescribed that the worst off should not fall below a set level of income, but then they allowed all others to have whatever higher incomes they might earn by contributing more to society. When Rawls was told about this, he responded: "If the results hold up it may be that the difference principle cuts across the grain of human nature." Oddly enough, Hauser tries to save Rawls from refutation by asserting that his difference principle might be embraced by all human beings unconsciously (90-91). But then Hauser never explains how human evolution would have favored an unconscious difference principle as an innate component of the moral instinct, and in fact, he says almost nothing about the difference principle as a fundamental principle of moral judgment.

What Hauser says about the "Rawlsian creature" depends on his contrast with the "Humean creature" and the "Kantian creature." But his cartoonish depictions bear little resemblance to their philosophic proponents. Hauser quotes Hume's famous declaration that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." But he does not notice the context of this remark that makes clear that Hume believes that reason can direct but not motivate action. Hume writes: "Reason and judgment may, indeed, be the mediate cause of an action, by prompting, or by directing a passion." Ignoring what Hume actually says, Hauser depicts the "Humean creature" as a purely emotivist being with no need for reason at all. Thus, Hauser never considers that the "action analysis" that he attributes to the "Rawlsian creature" was a crucial part of Hume's explanation of moral judgment.

Throughout much of the book, Hauser suggests that morality can best be explained as the work of the "Rawlsian creature" rather than the "Humean creature" or the "Kantian creature." But sometimes he suggests that morality is generally a continuing struggle between all three (418). Unless I am missing something fundamental in this book, he never resolves this confusion.

To test the claims of competing positions in moral philosophy, Hauser relies on research that depends on presenting people with moral dilemmas framed in artificial scenarios--such as the famous "trolley problem." Hauser admits that these scenarios are so artificial and abstract in their distance from everyday experience that they are little more than "toy examples." And yet he insists that the scientific method requires such abstract simplifications. He admits, however, that these "artificial examples" will not be persuasive if they are not combined with "real-life cases" (34-35). He often refers to real historical cases in his book. But he never develops any of these cases beyond a few sentences. For example, he refers to the American debate over slavery. But his remarks are so brief that they cannot capture the complexity of that debate (106, 167, 187). To speak of Abraham Lincoln as a moral "visionary," as he does, misses the reality of Lincoln as a statesman exercising prudence in making compromises that rejected the extremes of the abolitionist and proslavery positions. To say that applying the scientific method to morality requires "toy examples" begs the crucial question of whether there can be a science of morality that is not a historical science of irreducible complexity and uncertainty.

Hume sought to turn moral philosophy into a natural science. But he doing that, he relied as much on historical narrative--like his History of England--as on abstract theorizing. Doesn't a science of morality require such a combination of theory and history?

As I have argued here and elsewhere, a full science of morality would have to move through three levels of study--moral nature, moral culture, and moral judgment. We need to understand the universal moral principles of human nature as they interact with the variable cultural traditions of moral history. And we need to understand how individual moral judgments--like Lincoln deliberating about the Emancipation Proclamation--manifest the peculiarities of individual agents in particular circumstances as constrained by universal moral nature and specific moral traditions. Occasionally, Hauser recognizes this, as when he remarks: "What we need is a better sense of what real people do in real situations in real cultures" (131). But, unfortunately, in this book, we rarely see real people in real situations in real cultures.

If Hauser had devoted more attention to real historical cases, he might have clarified how exactly the universal moral instincts constrain particular moral traditions and individual moral judgments. As it is, Hauser's book leaves us in a fog on this crucial point. This was the problem that Richard Rorty stressed in his review of Hauser's book in The New York Times.

Hauser's problem is Aristotle's problem: if there is a universal, natural standard of right, then why do judgments of right and wrong across individuals and societies show so much variation? The general answer is that this variation is not arbitrary or unlimited, because it shows recurrent patterns that manifest the universal propensities of the natural sense of justice. On the one hand, Hauser explains, the "Weak Rawlsian" would say that the human species has "the capacity to acquire morally relevant norms, but nature hasn't provided any of the relevant details" (298). On the other hand, the "Staunch Rawlsian" would say that human beings are "equipped with specific moral principles about helping and harming, genetically built into the brain and unalterable by culture." Against these two opposing extremes--cultural determinism and genetic determinism--Hauser looks for middle ground: "A Temperate Rawlsian is equipped with a suite of principles and parameters for building moral systems. These principles lack specific content, but operate over the causes and consequences of action. What gives these principles content is the local culture. Every newborn child could build a finite but large number of moral systems."

But by itself, this general answer provokes more questions than it answers. "A finite but large number of moral systems"? How large? What are the finite limits? Sometimes Hauser says the natural moral instinct sanctions only "a narrow range of possible moral systems" (420). At other times, he says it would support "any of the world's moral systems" (426). Does this mean that the universal moral grammar does not allow us to judge any specific moral system as better or worse than others? If so, then moral progress is impossible, because we have no ground for ranking moral systems. So would this mean that moral systems prohibiting slavery are no better or worse than moral systems favoring slavery?

What we need--and what Hauser does not provide--is Darwinian moral history. We need to apply the Darwinian explanation of morality to human history to see how exactly the logic of that explanation works in the complex interaction of moral nature, moral culture, and moral judgment.

Two possible examples are the cases of incest and slavery. Edward Westermarck's Darwinian account of the incest taboo is one of the best examples of Darwinian moral history, because we can see how an evolved natural propensity to avoid incest is diversely expressed in different cultures and different individuals. Although Hauser often mentions the Westermarck theory of incest, he never elaborates it as an example of how a natural moral sense constrains the moral diversity of cultures and individuals (22-23, 166, 199-200, 299, 301). A couple of my blog posts on incest can be found here and here.

I have commented on Abraham Lincoln and the slavery debate many times on this blog. In Chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right, I extend my argument for Darwinian natural right by applying it to the history of slavery. I begin with a comparison of ant slavery and human slavery, in which I argue that while slavery among ants and human beings manifests a natural inclination to exploitation, the uniquely human opposition to slavery shows a natural moral sense that resists exploitation. I then argue that throughout the history of the debate over slavery--from Aristotle to Hume, to Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Darwin, to Lincoln--one can see the natural moral sense expressed as a joint product of emotional capacities for feeling moral passions like sympathy and anger and rational capacities for judging moral principles like kinship and reciprocity.

Hauser looks forward to the development of a "science of morality," in which "inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities and social sciences, but a shared journey with the natural sciences" (425). I agree with this aspiration towards a unification of knowledge--or "consilience" as Ed Wilson would call it--which would unite the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Darwinian moral history would be an important part of this project. In a previous post, I have called this "Darwinian liberal education."

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: Prudent Statesmanship or a Big Mistake?

I have argued that a Darwinian view of morality explains the moral sense as expressed at three levels of human experience: moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. To illustrate this, I have offered a Darwinian assessment of Abraham Lincoln's handling of the moral debate over slavery. Lincoln appealed to those natural moral sentiments that recognize the evil of slavery. He also appealed to the moral traditions of the United States--particularly, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence--as denying the moral claims of slavery, even as he recognized that the legal traditions of the Constitution would not sanction the immediate abolition of slavery in the South. As constrained by these moral sentiments and moral traditions, Lincoln had to exercise practical moral judgment in deciding how best to handle the slavery issue in the particular circumstances he faced.

He judged that he had no constitutional power to abolish slavery in the South, and he reassured the proslavery Southerners that he would abide by the constitutional compromises protecting slavery in the South. But he never wavered in his affirmation of the wrongness of slavery and his commitment to promoting the ultimate extinction of slavery as quickly as circumstances permitted. By the summer of 1862, he concluded that he could constitutionally emancipate slaves in those regions of the nation in rebellion, although this could be justified only as an act of military necessity exercised by the Commander in Chief in time of war. He believed that the permanent and complete abolition of slavery would require the passage of the 13th Amendment, which he supported.

The problem with such a practical moral judgment, however, is that it is always contestable and uncertain. A prudential judgment about practical circumstances can never be proven by pure logical demonstration from abstract principles. So there will often be deep controversy as to whether a judgment in complex, contingent circumstances is correct or not.

That is true for Lincoln's judgments about the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. We still debate the wisdom of what he did. This continuing debate is clear in two recent books--Michael Knox Beran's Forge of Empires, 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made and Jim Powell's Great Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery. Comparing the statesmanship of Lincoln, Tsar Alexander II, and Otto von Bismarck, Beran argues that Lincoln's leadership in the Civil War to defeat the Southern rebellion and abolish slavery saved free government against the threat of a new philosophy of authoritarian coercion. Powell argues, on the contrary, that the Civil War was a big mistake, because slavery could have been peacefully abolished in the United States, which would have avoided the Southern resentment that slowed the progress toward racial equality. Powell's criticisms of Lincoln are made by many paleoconservatives and libertarians who scorn Lincoln and show their sympathy for the "lost cause" of the South. Beran and Powell have briefly summarized their arguments in essays found here and here.

In this debate, I am on the side of Beran. The major weakness in Powell's book is that he never shows any understanding of Lincoln's reasoning about slavery, and therefore he never really responds to Lincoln's position.

Powell insists that abolishing slavery peacefully--as was done in much of South America and the Caribbean--is much better than trying to abolish it through war. But he doesn't realize that Lincoln agrees! Throughout his career up to the end of 1862, Lincoln argued for peaceful, gradual emancipation of slaves with compensation for slaveholders and voluntary colonization in Africa for freed slaves who would consent to this. But the proslavery leaders of the South repeatedly rejected this. In fact, as early as 1833, the Virginia legislation rejected a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves, the same kind of plan that Powell thinks worked so well elsewhere.

Powell notes that although compensation for Southern slaveholders would have been expensive, the Civil War was much more expensive. But this is exactly what Lincoln argued in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress! And yet the Southerners rebuffed his proposals.

Powell speculates that if the Southern states had been permitted to leave the Union in 1861, they eventually would have abolished slavery on their own. This shows one of the fundamental problems with moral judgment: we can never know for sure how history might have turned out if some judgments had been made differently. In 1861, Lincoln could have yielded to the demands of many to allow the Southern states leave without war. We don't know what would have happened. But Lincoln judged that this would have jeopardized the cause of freedom in the world, because he saw a powerful move in the South towards authoritarian coercion and away from the libertarian principles of the Declaration of Independence. Beran sees this as well, and he suggests that if Lincoln had not done what he did, the American South would have joined the forces of authoritarian paternalism in other parts of the world, and history might have shifted in that direction. Proslavery Southerners had dreamed of joining with slaveholders in the Caribbean to promote a growing empire of slave societies to challenge the free societies based on free labor. Powell does not explain why this would not have been a realistic possibility.

In fact, Powell never confronts the growing intellectual movement in the South toward a proslavery paternalist philosophy of coercion. In his book, Powell devotes one paragraph to the philosophical defense of slave society coming from John Randolph and John C. Calhoun (124). But he never says anything more about the pervasive Southern philosophy of paternalism based on the claim that all great civilizations required the rule of a few over the forced labor of a subordinated class--John Henry Hammond's "mud-sill" society. Lincoln saw this as a fundamental challenge to principles of a free society. Powell does not see this because he never really examines it. Beran shows how this kind of thinking was part of a world-wide counterrevolutionary movement of grandees to preserve their dominance against the revolutionary challenge of modern liberty.

At the end of his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, Lincoln claimed that the American Civil War would be a turning point in world history:

"Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save it. We--even we here--hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free--honoring alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."

Similarly, of course, at the end of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln hoped that the Civil War would bring a "new birth of freedom" so that popular government "shall not perish from the earth."

To many readers today, this sounds like rhetorical exaggeration. But the whole point of Lincoln's view of the debate over slavery and Union was that this really was a critical historical moment in which the modern principles of the free society were being challenged by the ancient principles of authoritarian paternalism. Beran's book brings this out very well by putting Lincoln's statesmanship into the world-wide historical setting of 1861-1871.

For Lincoln, this great historical debate would turn on whether the principles of the Declaration of Independence would be taken seriously or not. In his speech of July 10, 1858, Lincoln warned that the arguments of Douglas for denying the equal liberty of all human beings would tend "to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this government into a government of some other form."

"They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn it whatever way you will--whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent."

Similarly, in his letter of April 6, 1859, Lincoln affirmed that the principles of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence are "the definitions and axioms of a free society."

"And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.

"One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities'; another bluntly calls them 'self-evident lies'; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to 'superior races.'

"These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting of the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the vanguard--the miners and sappers--of returning despotism."

David Christian's book The Maps of Time--the subject of a recent post--allows us to see that Lincoln understood that the modern commercial republic was a radical break with five thousand years of human history dominated by agrarian, tributary states in which a ruling few lived by exploiting the labor of the many. The Southern "mud-sill" theory of government, based on the idea that human civilization required a ruling elite exploiting the labor of a subordinate class, was a restatement of the argument for the agrarian state based on class privilege.

Beran's book shows that the various modern expressions of authoritarian paternalism--in the proslavery South, in Bismarck's welfare state, in Russian autocracy, or in Marxist socialism--were all extensions of the premodern agrarian state tradition.

In resisting this tendency to return to the ancient tradition of statist authoritarianism, Lincoln's statesmanship in the Civil War really did preserve the principles of a free society as the "last best hope of earth."

The Bicentennial of Darwin and Lincoln

Next year will bring the bicentennial of the birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, who were born on February 12, 1809. There are many programs scheduled to celebrate either the Lincoln bicentennial or the Darwin bicentennial, but there are few programs bringing the two together. The only program that I know of that explores the link between Lincoln and Darwin is a program over the academic year--2008-2009--sponsored by the Center for Critical Inquiry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on the theme "Identity, Race, and Human Rights: Social Authority and the Legacies of Lincoln and Darwin."

The current issue of Newsweek has a cover article by Malcolm Jones on "Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?. There's a new book comparing Lincoln and Darwin by David Contosta entitled Rebel Giants. In January, Knopf will publish Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Making of the Modern Age.

On this blog, I have often written about the points of intellectual contact between Darwin and Lincoln. Some of these posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. These blog posts along with my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right convey my thoughts about the links between Darwin and Lincoln in their thinking about morality, politics, religion, and the place of human beings in nature.

Here I have one point to add. Lincoln had a remarkably deep understanding of human cultural evolution that follows the pattern of Darwinian universal history set forth by Darwin and by David Christian in the book that was the subject of my last post.

In his "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, his "Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society," and in his meeting with some American Indian chiefs, Lincoln laid out his conception of cultural evolution as moving through three stages of society--from foraging societies to agrarian societies to societies based on commercial exchange and free labor. Like Darwin and Christian, Lincoln believed that what made human beings unique in the animal world was the human capacity for symbolic speech, which allowed for collective learning in the artful domination of nature for the material, moral, and intellectual improvement of human life. Originally, all human beings lived by foraging--gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Some of the native American Indians manifested this way of life. The invention of agriculture--based on the cultivation of domesticated plants and the herding of domesticated animals--supported human civilization as an advance beyond the savage life of foragers. But despite the advance in civilization in agrarian states, such states were founded on slavery and other forms of coerced labor so that rulers lived by exploiting peasant labor. Lincoln saw that the Industrial Revolution based on commercial exchange and free labor was bringing a new revolution in human cultural evolution that promised the physical, moral, and intellectual liberation of labor. He saw the abolition of slavery as the crucial move towards this new state of society that would bring a "new birth of freedom," in which all human beings would have a fair chance in the "race of life."

Darwin saw this same revolution in the cultural evolution of humanity. That's why he followed with great interest the news reports of the American Civil War. We can see this in his correspondence with Asa Gray in the 1860s. Like Lincoln, Darwin was a life-long opponent of slavery who looked forward to its abolition. But like Frederick Douglass, Darwin was frustrated by Lincoln's slowness in attacking slavery, because he did not fully comprehend Lincoln's prudence in working for the "ultimate extinction" of slavery over time. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation illustrates his prudence, because he justifies the emancipation of slaves in the rebellious territories as a military necessity in time of war, while recognizing that the final and complete abolition of slavery would require the 13th Amendment. Here we see the complexity and contingency of moral judgment. It is not enough to appeal to some abstract principle of absolute morality. We must be able to judge what can be done and should be done in the circumstances of action. And since such practical judgment can never be exercised with certainty or precision, we can never be sure that our decisions are correct.

We see here how a Darwinian science of morality and politics would have to account for the complex interaction of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and individual judgment.

Many of these points will surely come up in my seminar on Lincoln this fall at Northern Illinois University.

David Christian's History of Everything

David Christian's Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004) is one of the most intellectually exciting books that I have read in recent years. As a historian specializing in Russian history, Christian taught for many years at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Now he teaches at San Diego State University. In 1989, the faculty in the history department at Macquarie were discussing what kind of introduction to history the department ought to offer their students, and Christian remarked, "Why not start at the beginning?" Traditionally, modern historians have assumed that the "beginning" of history was about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, where the first cities, states, and agrarian civilizations appeared, and writing was invented. Whatever happened before that was relegated to "prehistory." But Christian decided that a modern scientific view of history should allow historians to start at the real beginning of everything--the Big Bang, the origin of the universe, 13 billion years ago--so that human history would be understood properly as part of cosmic history. He called this "big history," and this book surveys the large patterns in this history from the Big Bang to the present, and with speculations about the future. (Daniel Lord Smail's Deep History and the Brain--the subject of a previous post--belongs to this same genre of historical writing.)

Those of us who take seriously the idea of liberal education as embracing all the intellectual disciplines need to look to Christian's book as a synthesis of knowledge in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities within the framework of universal history. This exemplifies what I have called "Darwinian liberal education," and what Edward O. Wilson has called "consilience"--the unity of all knowledge. Those of us striving to develop a biopolitical science should see Christian's book as a way of framing such a science by putting human political history within the broad sweep of cosmic evolutionary history. I foresee using Christian's book as a main text in my "Biopolitical Theory" class at Northern Illinois University.

After surveying the modern scientific understanding of the origins and history of the universe, the stars, the Earth, and life on Earth, Christian turns to human evolutionary history from the Paleolithic era to the present. He divides human history into three stages corresponding to three major eras of human social life: the foraging era (from 250,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago), the agrarian era (from 10,000 years ago to 1750 A.D.), and the modern era (from 1750 to the present). Christian has written a short summary of this human history for the first volume of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, and this has also been published separately as a short book.

Of course, one of the obvious problems in such a broad view of everything is finding general patterns to sustain a grand narrative. The broadest pattern for Christian's history is taken from Eric Chaisson--the emergence of ever more complex levels of order requires structuring the flow of energy to sustain order against the entropic tendency of the second law of thermodynamics. Within that cosmic pattern, human history's three eras can be seen as three levels of ever more complex order that require ever more complex means for extracting energy to sustain ever larger human populations. Foragers extract energy through hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants. Farmers extract energy through domesticated plants and animals. In the modern era, humans have come to rely increasingly on fossil fuels as sources of energy. The ultimate source of this energy in plants, animals, and fossil fuels is sunlight.

Another general pattern in human history is set by the human capacity for "collective learning." Although many animals have some capacity for learning, human language enhances the human capacity for learning beyond anything seen in the rest of the animal world. This permits human beings to spread widely over varying niches in their ecosystems and even to create new niches. The human history from foraging to farming to modernity is largely the history of human collective learning as human beings learn new ways to extract energy from their environments to sustain ever larger populations of human beings in ever more complex societies--so that now human beings live in a global system that has transformed life on earth.

Another related theme of Christian's history is emergence: at each higher level of complexity, phenomena appear that could not have been predicted from knowledge of the lower levels. This supports my argument that E. O. Wilson's consilience by strong reductionism doesn't work if it ignores the emergent complexity by which novelty arises at higher levels of complexity that cannot be reduced to the lower levels. It is true, however, that these higher levels are constrained by the lower levels--so that, for example, even the highest levels of complex order in the universe are subject to the second law of thermodynamics and the need to extract energy to sustain order.

Like any good book on the biggest questions that human beings can ask themselves, Christian's will stimulate debate and disagreement. Although I generally find his book persuasive, I also find myself arguing with him about some points. Here I will point to only a couple of points of discussion.

As opposed to agrarian states, foraging societies do not have elaborate hierarchies of power. But I think Christian is mistaken to suggest that they have no hierarchies at all. Actually, he indicates in at least one passage that they may well have "personal hierarchies" (240). This is important because it becomes hard to understand how agrarian states could produce such complex hierarchies of rule if there were no natural disposition to status hierarchies at all. From my reading of the anthropological literature on foragers, it seems to me that although foraging societies are roughly egalitarian, this does not mean that there are no distinctions of rank at all. Some individuals in foraging groups have more status than others, and some exercise leadership, but this leadership is ephemeral and informal, and those who become too exploitative in their dominance are subject to social pressure that levels everyone to preserve individual autonomy. In agrarian societies, this natural disposition of some individuals to dominate others is magnified, and much of the rest of the social and political history of human beings is the history of exploitative dominance and of the efforts of subordinates to resist such exploitation. On this point, I follow Chris Boehm on the tension between the desire of some for dominance and the desire of many to resist exploitative dominance. I have developed this point in Darwinian Conservatism.

On a somewhat related point, I think Christian does not give enough attention to the history of political philosophy, and thus he does not see that many of his ideas about human social evolution were well understood by social theorists. Not only that, but some of these political philosophers even tried to consciously shape the movement of that evolution.

Now, of course, I understand that in such a "big history" as Christian's, one must abstract from the details of particular events and individual behavior. But still, as Christian indicates, evolutionary history is contingent in that it often turns crucially on particular events. For example, the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago altered the whole course of the evolution of life on earth. Similarly, Christian concedes that major political changes often depend on "the decisions and actions of individuals" (481). This would include individual thinkers who understood the general pattern in the natural history of society and who might try to shape that pattern.

For example, Christian notes that the European contact with the New World beginning in the 16th century created the first global exchange network that led to the modern era, and he also notes that this new global knowledge contributed to the intellectual evolution of modern science (393-94). One manifestation of this would be how the traveler's reports from the new world influenced political philosophers like Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. For instance, Locke's Second Treatise of Government lays out the same natural history of society--from foraging societies to agrarian societies to commercial societies--that Christian develops in his book. But what one sees in Locke's work is a conscious argument for moving into the era of commercial society based on private property, free market exchange, and limited government. Political philosophers like Locke did not just see this evolutionary movement at work. They also set themselves to promote it and direct it. Their cultural and political influence on individual thinkers and politicians would explain much of the course of that social evolutionary history that Christian describes. But Christian never ponders the importance of those political thinkers like Locke who understood what was happening and who tried to direct it.

Studying Locke's argument for liberal democratic capitalism might also have led Christian to reconsider his Marxist tendency to disparage "consumer capitalism" (446-457, 472-81). Although he admits that the Marxist regimes of the 20th century did not offer a good alternative to capitalism, he still cannot give up his Marxist scorn for capitalism. He is surely entitled to lay out his criticisms of modern capitalist society. But he doesn't show that he has thought through the classical liberal argument for capitalism and limited government--an argument laid out by thinkers like Locke, Smith, and Hayek.

I should also say, however, that scholars of political philosophy would benefit from studying Christian's "big history" and seeing how it might illuminate the broad historical movements that set the terms for debate in the history of political philosophy.

While conceding that capitalism has been the primary engine for the explosive population growth and technological innovation of the past 250 years, Christian worries that unchecked capitalist growth over the next century could bring environmental and social collapse. The only way to achieve "sustainable development" is for capitalism to be steered by governmental regulation to limit growth. But Christian does not respond to the arguments of those like Terry Anderson who promote "free market environmentalism" based on the idea that the best path to sustainable development is through private property and the rule of law. Christian's worry about a future of depleted resources reflects his devotion to the ideas of Thomas Malthus. But those like Anderson would argue that Malthus failed to see how Adam Smith's vision of capitalism laid out a path to sustainable development that remains as powerful for the future as it has been for the last couple of centuries.

Christian concludes his book by speculating on the future of the universe long after human beings and all life has been extinguished by the expansion and then cooling of the sun. "The universe will be a dark, cold place, filled only with black holes and stray subatomic particles that wander light-years apart from each other" (489). He concludes that while the creation of human beings as the only intelligent species capable of contemplating the universe might appear to be the ultimate purpose of the universe's creation from nothing, there is no scientific justification for this. "Modern science offers no good reason for believing in such anthropocentrism. Instead, it seems, we are one of the more exotic creations of a universe in the most youthful, exuberant, and productive phase of a very long life. Though we no longer see ourselves as the center of the universe or the ultimate reason for its existence, this may still be grandeur enough for many of us."

This sounds a lot like Friedrich Nietzsche in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense": "In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history'--yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."

Nietzsche thought this was a "deadly truth" of modern science. But he also thought that human beings might learn to embrace a "gay science" in which reverence for earthly life in all of its transience and contingency might be enough for them. Is there grandeur enough in this vision?

Brain Imaging Is Not Mind Reading

Last November 11th, The New York Times published an op-ed article with the title "This Is Your Brain on Politics." The authors--neuroscientists and political scientists--reported that they had done brain scans of 20 swing voters responding to images of the leading American presidential candidates. For example, they wrote: "Mitt Romney shows potential. Of all the candidate's speech excerpts, Mr. Romney's sparked the greatest amount of brain activity, especially among the men we observed. His still photos prompted a significant amount of activity in the amygdala, indicating voter anxiety, but when the subjects saw him and heard his video, their anxiety died down. Perhaps voters will become more comfortable with Mr. Romney as they see more of him." They also reported that John McCain and Barack Obama elicited "a notable lack of any powerful reactions, positive or negative." This article provoked a letter to the editor signed by 17 neuroscientists who protested the publication of such a crude brain imaging study that had no scientific basis. They noted that "a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible." They also indicated that the amygdala cannot provide a brain marker of anxiety, because the amygdala is activated not just by anxiety but also by various kinds of arousal and positive emotions.

This illustrates what I called last year "the brain imaging fallacy." That post can be found here. The fallacy is the assumption that a brain image--as in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)--is a photograph of the mind at work. Almost every day, there is a new report from proponents of "neuroeconomics," "neurolaw," or "neuroethics" who claim to have brain scans showing the mental activity associated with economic, legal, or ethical behavior.

There seems to be a growing recognition in the scientific community about the serious ramifications of this brain imaging fallacy. Recently, the two most important journals of science have published articles on this problem. Nature (June 12, 2008) has published an article by Nikos Logothetis on "What we can and what we cannot do with fMRI." Science (June 13, 2008) has published an article by Greg Miller on "Growing Pains for fMRI." The scientific and philosophical difficulties with brain imaging have been surveyed recently in an article by Adina Roskies in the journal Neuroethics. The winter, 2008 issue of The New Atlantis has articles by O. Carter Snead and Matthew Crawford on the implications of "neuro-talk" for law and morality.

Here are some of the difficulties that contribute to the brain imaging fallacy.

1. Functional neuroimaging is not a direct measure of neuronal activity because it measures only indirect surrogates--particularly, the flow of oxygenated blood.

2. The interpretation of these brain scans depends on elaborate theoretical assumptions about the relationships between blood flow and neural activity.

3. Many different kinds of brain activity can produce the same fMRI signal.

4. No two brains are alike in their structure or functioning, and therefore brain scans require an averaging procedure.

5. Interpreting these brain scans assumes that mental activity can be decomposed into distinct parts corresponding to distinct parts of the brain, although the interconnectedness of brain activity make this unlikely to be completely true.

6. Although the sensory and motor activities of the brain do seem to be clearly localized in identifiable parts of the brain, it is much more speculative to assign the higher cognitive activities to particular parts of the brain.

7. Although brain scans and neuroscience generally show clearly that the brain supports mental activity, this does not show how the brain does this.

8. Since the mind is an emergent property of the brain, the mind depends on, but is not simply reducible to the brain; and this gap is most evident in the contrast between our subjective experience of consciousness and the objective study of the brain in neuroscience. There will always be a gap between our scientific observation of brains at work and our introspective knowledge that comes from our first-hand experience.

As I have argued on this blog and in Darwinian Conservatism, the scientific study of the human mind can clarify but not resolve one of the deepest mysteries of human experience--the emergence of the soul in the brain.

Those who interpret brain imaging as supporting a reductionist materialism conclude that this denies the traditional moral and legal standards of individual choice and responsibility. But once we recognize the brain imaging fallacy, and see the mind as an emergent product of the brain, it becomes clear that neuroscience does not contradict our traditional understanding of moral choice and legal responsibility as rooted in the power of the mind for deliberate thought and action.

Are Conservatism and Liberalism Genetically Inherited?

In 2005, the American Political Science Review published an article by John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing entitled "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?." Relying on studies of twins that compare the traits of monozygotic (identical) twins and dizygotic (fraternal) twins, they concluded that propensities towards "conservatism" or "liberalism" are indeed strongly influenced by genes, because genetics accounts for approximately half of the variance in ideology. This article received wide coverage in the popular press, including an article in the New York Times.

Now, in the June 2008 issue of Perspectives on Politics--published by the American Political Science Association--there is a critique of this article by Evan Charney along with responses to Charney by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing in one article and by Rebecca Hannagan and Peter Hatemi in another. The debate in these articles provides a good introduction to some of the controversies surrounding behavior genetics, particularly as applied to the social sciences.

Unfortunately, one sees here a recurrent problem in the debate over the genetics of human social behavior--both sides in the debate tend to employ "straw man" arguments. Like many critics of behavior genetics, Charney attacks this field of study for promoting genetic determinism. Like many proponents of behavior genetics, Alford, Funk, Hibbing, Hannagan, and Hatemi attack their critics as environmental determinists. But when one looks carefully, one can see that no one is defending genetic determinism, and no one is defending environmental determinism. In fact, everyone in the debate agrees that human behavior arises from a complex interaction of genes and environment. But instead of trying to work through this interactionist complexity, the participants in the debate ridicule their opponents by attributing to them positions that they don't really take.

Charney says that he is resisting the tendency "to view ever more complex attitudes or systems of belief as in some sense genetically determined (or 'heritable')" (299). He disagrees with the article by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing as claiming "that political orientations are genetically determined" (300). But this is not what Alford, Funk, and Hibbing say. Instead, they say that they have presented evidence "that political orientations are transmitted genetically as well as culturally" (321), and they emphasize that "genes and the environment interact in a complex fashion." Similarly, Hannagan and Hatemi say that "genetic factors exert their influence on an organism in a particular environment such that any trait must be a combination of the two factors," and so "it may be the case that the more we learn about genes the more we discover the importance of relevant environmental influences on behavior" (332-33). It seems then that Charney's attack on genetic determinism is an attack on a straw man.

But the same rhetorical strategy is employed by the other side. Alford, Funk, and Hibbing say that they are challenging "environmental determinism," which claims "that genes are irrelevant to human behavior" (321, 325). They also attack Charney as a "dualist" who assumes an absolute separation between mind and body. Similarly, Hannagan and Hatemi criticize Charney's "exclusively environmental explanations" as assuming a "social determinism" that is implausible (330, 333). But then Charney says that any claim "that genes are irrelevant to human behavior" is "preposterous" and is not the claim he has made (339-40). He also indicates that nowhere in his article does he endorse the "dualism" attributed to him by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing.

This straw-man argumentation rests on a false dichotomy of nature and nurture. Almost no one believes that human behavior is determined completely by genetic nature. And almost no one believes that human behavior is determined completely by social nurture. Almost everyone who examines the relevant evidence and argument would have to conclude that for complex human behavior the causes must be both genetic and cultural.

There are good reasons to agree with Alford, Funk, and Hibbing that there are some genetically inherited propensities of temperament that influence one's political ideology. But what one inherits directly is not the tendency to "conservatism" or "liberalism," but "orientations to bedrock principles of group life" that might have an evolutionary history going back to our earliest evolutionary ancestors (324-25).

For example, one distinction between liberalism and conservatism made by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing is that conservatives tend to be pessimistic about human nature, while liberals tend to be more optimistic. This conforms to what I have said in Darwinian Conservatism about the "realist" view of human nature in conservative thought as opposed to the "utopian" view in liberal thought. But, as Charney indicates, the detailed elaboration of conservative and liberal thought is a product of culturally contingent circumstances that arose over the history of Europe and the United States over the last two centuries (for instance, the divergent reactions to the French Revolution). Consequently, the political debate between conservatives and liberals will manifest a complex interaction of inherited temperament and cultural experience.

Daniel Smail and the Neuroscience of History

At the end of August, I will be presenting a paper in Boston at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association on "Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Politics." This paper will be part of a series of panels on "Evolution and Morality" sponsored by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. For my paper, there will be written responses from Daniel Lord Smail, a historian at Harvard, and Richard Richards, a philosopher at the University of Alabama.

The very idea of "deep history" is one that I have borrowed from Smail, particularly as he develops it in his recent book On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008). Smail points out that historians today assume that the true "history" of humanity began about 5,000 years ago with the invention of writing, and so everything else that happened to human beings prior to that is dismissed as "prehistory." Noting that there is plenty of evidence for human life prior to writing, Smail suggests there is no good reason why historians shouldn't develop a grand historical narrative that would encompass the whole of human experience from the Paleolithic era to the present.

That few historians today can even conceive of this reflects what Smail calls "the grip of sacred history." In the Western world, the influence of biblical religion led historians for many centuries to assume that history began about 6,000 years ago with the divine creation of Adam and Eve. Even when secular historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to break away from the biblical creation story, they still held onto a secular version of this story: they assumed that history began about 6,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia. Whatever happened to human beings prior to this was set aside as "prehistory."

In his new book, Smail argues for rejecting the chronological limits of sacred history and pursuing the study of deep history as including the entire genetic and cultural history of humanity. This would require interdisciplinary research combining traditional history and biological science. He offers an outline of how this could be done by concentrating on neurohistory--the history of humanity based on the evolution of the human brain. For this, historians would apply contemporary neuroscience to the study of human history. Historians must always employ psychological assumptions about human motivations in their historical explanations. Smail suggests that neuroscience would provide historians a psychological science rooted in modern biology.

One example of neurohistory for Smail is explaining the human dominance hierarchies that arose after the agricultural revolution allowed small groups of elite individuals to rule over large groups of subordinates. Dominant individuals must employ whatever devices they can to induce submissive dispositions in their subordinates. In matriarchal baboon societies, high-ranking females harass subordinate females in ways that create high levels of stress. Similarly, we might expect that in human dominance hierarchies, high-ranking individuals would intimidate their subordinates in ways that would generate stress hormones that make them feel submissive.

At one level, such an explanation might seem so obvious as to be trivial. After all, if subordinate individuals are submissive towards dominant individuals, one would assume that there must be some kind of biochemical state in the brains of the subordinates associated with a psychic state of submission. But at another level, such a explanation might seem dubious insofar as they are untestable. Because there is no way to gather neurophysiological data from the distant past to support the explanations. Smail admits this, but argues that even without direct tests of his neurophysiological hypotheses, we might find support in the historical sources for such neurohistorical reasoning. Knowledge of human neurophysiology offers an interpretive framework within which we might generate historical explanations that are heuristically powerful.

More generally, Smail argues for viewing cultural history as depending on "psychotropic mechanisms"--behavioral practices and institutional structures that have neurochemical effects that shape human moods. We might view each kind of social order as having a distinct psychotropic profile. For example, we might explain the medieval church as shaping the behavior of believers through ceremonial rituals and religious practices that modulate the chemical messengers in the brain in ways that sustain dependence on the church. But then in the eighteenth century, there was a clear decline in religious activities, which might be correlated with the popularity of new psychotropic commodities like coffee, tobacco, and alcoholic drinks like gin and rum. In fact, much of the public life of European cities in the eighteenth century was centered in coffeehouses and cafes.

To be persuaded of Smail's specific explanations, I would need more evidence and argumentation than he provides in his book. But I can accept his general idea--that every form of social order must appeal to the human nervous system by shaping the neurochemical activity of individuals to support the behavioral patterns of that society. I have argued that there are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are rooted in human biological nature, and these twenty natural desires provide a universal basis for moral and political experience. These natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary traditions of social life. And within the constraints of natural desires and customary traditions, there is still some freedom for the exercise of prudential judgment by individuals. I would say that what Smail calls "psychotropic mechanisms" are the various means by which a social order modulates the neurochemistry corresponding to the twenty natural desires.

Although Smail's neurohistory has much in common with evolutionary psychology, he criticizes the evolutionary psychologists in the tradition of Cosmides and Tooby for being too ahistorical in their reasoning, because they jump from the "environment of evolutionary adaptation" as shaped in the Paleolithic era to the modern present without any account of the historical development from one to the other. Although Smail agrees with the evolutionary psychologists that the genetic evolution of the human species has shaped the human brain to manifest the predispositions of human nature, he thinks the evolutionary psychologists don't go far enough in recognizing the plasticity of that brain and how that neural plasticity makes possible cultural history. Like David Sloan Wilson, Smail emphasizes the need for explaining human behavior as shaped by gene-culture coevolution, and for that we need neurohistory.

I would say that what we need here is a theoretical framework of constrained plasticity that moves through three levels of social order--the natural history of the human species, the cultural history of human groups, and the individual history of the human beings in each group.

Smail has been influenced by David Buller's critique of evolutionary psychology in his book Adapting Minds. Stressing the diversity and contingency of human behavior and thought over evolutionary time, Buller concludes that "human nature is a superstition" (480). But I would say this is just as mistaken as concluding that since no two human beings have exactly the same anatomical structures, human anatomy is a superstition. While recognizing the anatomical diversity and contingency of human beings, the science of human anatomy presumes only that there is sufficient regularity in the patterns of human anatomical structure to warrant the generalizations of anatomy. Similarly, the science of human behavioral nature presumes that there is enough regularity in the patterns of human behavioral nature to warrant the study of human nature. In fact, Smail speaks about the need for broad categories of patterns or tendencies in studying human nature to support any deep history of human life. My account of the twenty natural desires specifies such patterns as manifesting a human nature grounded in the regularity of human neurophysiology.

Stephen Morse and the Neuroscience of Law

It seems that recent research in neuroscience is challenging traditional conceptions of free will and legal responsibility. Neuroscience shows that the brain is a physical entity governed by natural causes and is thus just as deterministic as the rest of the physical world. Neuroscience also shows how the brain determines the mind. It seems to follow that the mind's thoughts and choices are determined. But if that is so, then it seems that free will is an illusion, because no one is really responsible for his or her choices. This would deny the traditional understanding of responsibility in morality and law. People cannot be held morally or legally responsible for their choices, because they can always say, My brain made me do it!

If this were true, it would be a social catastrophe unprecedented in human history, because it would abolish the psychological foundations of our moral and legal systems. The fear of such a catastrophe motivates much of the fear of modern biological explanations of human nature. One can see that fear, for example, in the writing of intelligent design creationists like John West. (West has been the subject of many of my posts on this blog.) These folks assume that we cannot hold people morally and legally responsible for their behavior unless we invoke the idea that human beings have been created in God's image with a spiritual soul that cannot be explained as a product of natural evolutionary causes, because only such a supernatural soul can exercise free will in acting as an uncaused cause that transcends the realm of natural causes as studied by science.

But as I have argued in Darwinian Natural Right, in Darwinian Conservatism, and on this blog, this fear is unwarranted, because biological explanations of human nature in general and of the human brain in particular are fully compatible with traditional conceptions of moral and legal responsibility.

I agree with Jonathan Edwards, David Hume, and others who argue that moral responsibility and natural causation are compatible. But to see this compatibility, we must reject the idea of "free will" as uncaused cause. Whatever comes into existence must have a cause. Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused or self-determined. The commonsense notion of liberty is power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice. Human freedom of choice is not freedom from nature but a natural freedom to deliberate about our natural desires so that we can organize and manage our desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived. This is how Aristotle understood moral choice.

Similarly, Darwin believed that "every action whatever is the effect of a motive," and therefore he doubted the existence of "free will." Our motives arise from a complex interaction of innate temperament, individual experience, social learning, and external conditions. Still, although we are not absolutely free of the causal regularities of nature, Darwin believed, we are morally responsible for our actions because of our uniquely human capacity for reflecting on our motives and circumstances and acting in the light of those reflections. "A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives--of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals."

If we understand moral responsibility in this way, and see this as the conception of responsibility assumed in the law, then neuroscientific research on the natural causality of the brain is no threat to moral and legal responsibility. Stephen Morse--a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who specializes in psychology and law--has laid out the case for this conclusion based on a "compatibilist" view of moral choice. He has done this in "New Neuroscience, Old Problems," a paper published in two books--Neuroscience and the Law (2004), edited by Brent Garland, and Defining Right and Wrong in Brain Science (2007), edited by Walter Glannon, both published by Dana Press.

As Morse indicates, the "hard determinists" and the "metaphysical libertarians" agree that "free will" would require a "contra-causal freedom." But while the determinists deny there is such a thing. The libertarians affirm its existence as an uncaused cause beyond natural causality. If we had to choose between these two positions, neuroscience would favor the determinists.

But Morse rightly argues that the law's conception of responsibility does not require a "contra-causal freedom." It requires only that human beings have sufficient practical rationality to understand their choices and to act on their deliberate decisions. When rationality is so diminished that someone cannot understand or act on his choices--a child or someone who is insane, for example--then we excuse their behavior and do not hold them fully responsible for their actions. But this conception of moral and legal responsibility as based on the capacity for practical deliberation or rationality does not require any transcendence of natural causality.

Under the "compatibilist" conception of responsibility that Morse, Darwin, and I defend, research in neuroscience can have some interesting implications for law, but it poses no fundamental challenge to the traditional understanding of legal responsibility. Neuroscience can tell us a lot about the natural causes in the brain that predispose human beings in one direction or another. But this does not deny what Darwin recognized as the uniqueness of a human beings as moral beings capable of reflecting on their circumstances and acting on the basis of past experience and future expectations. This is not free will as an uncaused cause, but it is the natural freedom that human beings have as a product of their evolved nature.

Louann Brizendine and the Neuroscience of the Female Brain

A few decades ago, the prevailing opinion among academic intellectuals in Western societies was that men and women were born with the same brains, but that the patriarchal socialization of children by cultural learning created stereotypical differences in male and female thought and behavior that favor male oppression of women. This suggested that social reformers could liberate women from patriarchal oppression by changing the environment of social learning to promote an androgynous society in which men and women would learn to think and act in virtually identical ways. But in recent decades, research in the biology of sex differences has challenged this position by showing how the biological nature of men and women differ in ways that are not explainable as products of social construction, and thus there is a natural limit to how far cultural changes can go in creating an androgynous society.

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have drawn from that new research on the biology of sex differences to support my claim that men and women really are different by nature, but that those natural differences suggest not the superiority of men over women but the complementarity of male and female norms, in which the sometimes predatory propensities of men might be moderated by the civilizing prudence of women.

Most recently, advances in neuroscience have deepened our knowledge of how the differing neural and hormonal systems of men and women shape somewhat differing brains. Much of this new research come from improvements in brain-imaging technology. (Actually, there are some problems coming from reading too much into these brain images. But that's a post for another day.) Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain (New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006) surveys this research refuting the idea of the "unisex brain" and supporting the idea that female brains differ biologically from male brains.

The popular success of Brizendine's book comes from her combining impressive credentials and a lively writing style. She is a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic. She has advanced degrees in medicine and neurobiology from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. She translates her expert knowledge into engaging writing by using anecdotes about the women she has counseled and by adopting a light and witty style. The main text of the book is written without any footnotes. But it's followed by 80 pages of citations and references to the scientific research supporting her claims.

Some of Brizendine's academic critics are put off by the cutesy style of the writing. For example, she identifies the hormone oxytocin as "fluffy, purring kitty; cuddly, nurturing, earth mother; the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz; finds pleasure in helping and serving; sister to vasopressin (the male socializing hormone), sister to estrogen, friend of dopamine (another feel-good brain chemical" (xv). Of course, this is not the language of scientific research reports. But I can't see what's wrong with such language in a book written for a wide, popular audience, as long as the clever writing is not deceptive.

A more serious criticism is that sometimes the citations in the back of Brizendine's book don't clearly support the claims she makes in her main text. For example, in speaking about how women tend to be more talkative than men, she writes: "Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand" (14). Readers who wonder where she got these numbers might check the notes, where they discover that they come from a self-help book that cites no specific research to sustain this claim. Similarly, she writes: "Girls speak faster on average--250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males" (36). Readers who consult the notes will see a reference to an article about "speaking rates" among "20 pre-school stuttering and non-stuttering children and their mothers," which actually says nothing about differences between girls and boys in their speaking.

Here's one more example of the dubious connection between Brizendine's text and her citations. She says that one of the reasons why women have a better memory for emotional details than do men is that "a woman's amygdala is more easily activated by emotional nuance" (128). Her supporting reference is an article by Stephen Hamann, "Sex Differences in the Responses of the Human Amygdala". If you read the article, you will see that the conclusions of the article are much more complicated than what Brizendine reports. Accoring to Hamann's survey of the research, high amygdala activity is related to emotional memory for both man and women; but for men, it's the right amygdala, while for women its the left amygdala. And yet, Hamann notes, conscious ratings of emotional arousal correlate with the left amygdala for both men and women. Hamann then suggests that women's greater emotional memory might be a product of the fact that there is more overlap of brain regions for the women. Moreover, Hamann also shows that men manifest greater amygdala activity in response to visual sexual stimuli, in contrast to women. This is, I think, a typical example of how Brizendine often oversimplifies the research she's citing to make it sharper for her purposes.

Another example of this runs throughout the book, and it can be seen easily by an attentive reader, even without checking her citations. Oxytocin is one of the main protagonists in Brizendine's story. The Greek etymology of "oxytocin" denotes "quick delivery," because this hormone stimulates contractions of the uterus during child birth. Farmers inject their pregnant animals with oxytocin to induce delivery. But Brizendine speaks of oxytocin as associated not just with child birth but also with love, trust, orgasm, hugging, calming breast-feeding babies, and monogamous pair-bonding. But she never acknowledges what should be evident here to any careful reader: oxytocin does nothing by itself, because its diverse effects depend upon the diverse contexts in which it appears. This sort of causal complexity and contextuality is common in biology. But Brizendine tends to play it down in order to tell a clear, engaging story.

At the root of this problem is the big issue of nature versus nurture. Brizendine is sometimes confusing in how she approaches this issue. In her Introduction, for example, she says that female aptitudes are naturally "hardwired into the brains of women" (8). This suggests that she is a biological determinist, and it opens her up to all of the reasonable criticisms of such determinism. But then on the next page, she speaks of how the female brain is shaped "by a combination of nature and nurture" (9). Elsewhere in the book, she writes about how female propensities reflect the complex interaction of genes, hormones, life history, and social interactions (20, 27, 55, 68-69, 74, 100, 110, 133, 136-37, 147).

Here she comes close to the idea of "nurturing nature" that I lay out--in Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism--as an alternative to the false dichotomy between nature and nurture. To fully account for human nature, we need to see human thought and action as arising from the complex interaction of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual judgments. In fact, many of Brizendine's stories about the women she counsels illustrate that complexity of human experience.

This certainly holds true, for example, in what she says about the "mommy brain." Most women are naturally inclined to reproduction and child care, and that natural inclination is evident in their brains as evolved products of human evolution. But the specific expression of that natural propensity will vary according to the social circumstances of life and the individual judgments of the women making the best of their lives facing the sometimes difficult trade-offs presented to them.

As I indicated a few weeks ago in my post on Wendell Berry and E. O. Wilson, I agree with Berry that to understand the human mind we something more than the formula "mind = brain = machine." We need the more complex formula "mind = brain + body + world + local dwelling place + community + history," with "history" encompassing "the whole heritage of culture, language, memory, tools, and skills."

If one keeps in mind the emergent complexity of human life--and thus rejects any reductionist determinism--then one can read Brizendine's book as a rich survey of the female brain, the male brain, and the human brain shared by both men and women.