Classical Liberalism as Evolutionary Niche Construction for Declining Violence: Bonobos and Humans

At the Liberty Fund conference on "Liberty and Violence," one of the participants was a primatologist who studies bonobos in Africa.  At one point in our discussion of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, she complained about how Pinker unfairly dismisses the evidence for peaceful cooperation among bonobos, in contrast to the violence of chimpanzees.  She noted that Pinker relies on primatologists who study chimps or who have only studied bonobos in zoos, and who want to make bonobos look like chimps in their tendency to violence.

She explained that in the wild bonobo females serve a policing function, in that they intervene in fights to moderate conflicts through impartial mediation, because they benefit from living in a stable social order that is not disrupted by violence.

She also observed that bonobos--like all primates--show a range of personality types, so that some individuals have more violent temperaments than others, and consequently the occurrence of violence can depend on the contingency of whether there are such violent individuals in the group.  She said that many of the deaths of the males comes from "testosterone poisoning"--young males vigorously displaying their virility in the forest canopy can kill themselves by slamming into a tree.

She also said that if dominant males are grouped together in zoos without females who can moderate their male conflicts, then nasty fighting is likely to break out.  She explained then that what the females are doing in the wild groups in pacifying conflicts is "niche construction"--behavior that creates a social environment in which stable and peaceful cooperation is adaptive.

Here she was appealing to an idea developed by F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman in Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton University Press, 2003).  In most of evolutionary theory, we think of organisms as carrying genes, and the inheritance of these genes by the next generation depends on organisms surviving and reproducing according to chance and natural selection in their environments.  But there is another process of evolution that arises from organisms changing their environments, which modifies the natural selection pressures in their environments.  This is evolutionary niche construction.  Among many animals, evolutionary niche construction includes the transmission of culturally learned traditions.  And among human beings, it includes the transmission of culturally learned symbolic systems such as art, science, religion, and philosophy.

In response to this discussant's comment about social niche construction among bonobos, I suggested that the history of classical liberalism is evolutionary niche construction, and that this is a big part of Pinker's argument: the history of classical liberal philosophy has created a cultural moral environment of liberalism in which peaceful cooperation and declining violence are adaptive.  (This is what Deirdre McCloskey would identify as the work of rhetorical entrepreneurs in the marketplace of ideas who have used moral persuasion to create a liberal culture that honors the bourgeois virtues.)

As Pinker argues, human nature is a mixture of Inner Demons and Better Angels.  Human beings are innately predisposed to violence by their Inner Demons, but the expression of those predispositions is not "hydraulic"--that is, a drive that must necessarily be satisfied--but "strategic"--that is, a propensity that is responsive to environmental triggers.  Classical liberalism constructs a cultural niche of social institutions, mental attitudes, and moral traditions that tend to elicit the Better Angels to motivate voluntary cooperation and nonviolent relationships.

In this way, human nature constrains but does not determine human culture and individual judgment.  Within the constraints of human nature as a mixture of Inner Demons and Better Angels, classical liberalism can foster those cultural traditions and individual judgments that limit the Inner Demons and channel the Better Angels towards a system of liberty and voluntarism.

A few of the people at this Liberty Fund conference were such fervent critics of the Pinker argument that they resolutely rejected this claim that there has been a historical trend towards declining violence as fostered by classical liberal culture.  But by the end of our discussions, I had a strong impression that many--and maybe most--of the people there found the Pinker argument persuasive, even if one could dispute some of Pinker's evidence and argumentation.

Nevertheless, even those of us who were persuaded by Pinker were left with the unsettling conclusion that while the general historical trend of declining violence and increasing liberty was encouraging, the contingencies of history make it impossible to predict that this trend will continue unbroken into the future.

There was a lot of discussion of whether Pinker's science is a falsifiable and predictive science.  I argued that Pinker's science is a historical science, as opposed to nonhistorical sciences like physics and chemistry.  In a historical science, one can make retrospective  predictions about the past and make only broad pattern predictions about the future.  One cannot precisely predict the future.  And, indeed, Pinker stresses that he is only claiming that we can see declining violence in past history, and that we cannot be sure that this will continue into the future.  His entire book, as he indicates in the first paragraph (xxi), is looking backward, so that he does not, because he cannot, make precise predictions about the future.

Pinker suggests that there are four possible historical trends in war--escalation, cyclical, random, and declining sawtooth (191-92).  He is arguing for seeing the trend as a declining sawtooth.  The way he draws this pattern through the Second World War as one data point shows that in a declining sawtooth pattern, there can be generally decline in violence, while still allowing for a sudden jump in violence towards the greatest single atrocity in human history--55 million violent deaths in the Second World War--which indicates the radical contingency in Pinker's historical science.

This contingency is made evident in Pinker's book by his noting how three individuals acting under the influence of illiberal ideologies were responsible for the greatest atrocities of the 20th century.  The Second World War would not have occurred without Hitler.  The Great Purge in the Soviet Union would not have occurred without Stalin.  The Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution in China would not have occurred without Mao.  So "tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals" (343).

It will always be possible for such individuals to appear in circumstances that allow them to rise to positions of power that enable them to perpetrate mass atrocities of violence.  But this can be made unlikely insofar as classical liberalism as evolutionary niche construction continues to spread, making us more like bonobos and less like chimpanzees.

Some of these points are elaborated in my series of posts on Pinker (in October to December of 2011) and in my post on "The Behavioral Ecology of Chimpanzee War and Liberal Peace."