Socialism and Human Nature: Cosmides, Tooby, Haidt, and Hayek

For the classical liberal proponents of capitalism, who point to the long history of socialism's moral and economic failures, it's hard to understand the continuing popular appeal of socialism, as illustrated most recently by the popularity of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. 

Friedrich Hayek explained this by arguing that socialism was an atavistic appeal to the moral instincts of our foraging ancestors, and that capitalism was a recent artificial construction of culture that required the repression of those innate instincts of human nature as shaped in foraging bands hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Some of those classical liberals influenced by Hayek have wondered whether the evolutionary psychology of those like Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jonathan Haidt confirms Hayek's insight about how a capitalist culture must fight against a socialist nature.  Against this, I have argued that this is a mistake, because it fails to see how capitalist liberal culture appeals to the evolved human instincts for social exchange or trade and for the liberty expressed as resistance to oppression.

A few weeks ago, the Cato Institute organized a panel of speeches by Cosmides, Tooby, and Haidt on the topic of "Socialism and Human Nature," which can be seen online as a video.  (I thank Kent Guida for alerting me to this.)  Although their comments provide a partial confirmation for Hayek's atavism thesis, they implicitly reject Hayek's claim that capitalism is a purely cultural artifact that requires the repression of evolved human nature; and thus they end up close to my argument.

Cosmides begins by noting that Karl Marx had been persuaded by some anthropologists (Lewis Henry Morgan, in particular) that our ancient foraging ancestors shared their food in ways that showed that they were living in primitive communism based on the decision rule "from each according to his ability to each according to his need."  Marx thought that after the overthrow of modern capitalism, a modern form of communism could be established by reviving this instinctive propensity to communist sharing.

Cosmides argues that Marx was partially right, in that foragers did have rules for sharing large game from hunting and for sharing within families, and that this was an evolved instinct of human nature.  But Marx was wrong in not seeing that among foragers there were many different evolved systems regulating cooperation, and that sharing the food from hunting was only one. 

Hunting among foragers is a highly risky and highly variable activity, and much of the variance is due to luck.  To protect themselves against the bad luck of failing to capture any game animals, hunters engage in risk pooling, which constitutes a kind of insurance system.  Those lucky hunters who come back from the day's hunt with meat must share some of their meat with those unlucky hunters who failed to capture any meat.  The lucky hunters do this because they know that tomorrow they might be the unlucky ones who will need the lucky ones to share.

In this account of hunting among foragers, Cosmides relies on a paper by Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill on the Ache foragers of Paraguay.  We might wonder whether this foraging group is representative of our prehistoric ancestors, and whether we can draw general conclusions about human nature from studying this one group.  As indicated in a previous post, some anthropologists think that foraging societies are too variable to justify any generalizations about evolved human nature. (See Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan, "Why Do Male Foragers Hunt and Share Food?" Current Anthropology 34 [1993]:701-706; and Hillard Kaplan and Michael Gurven, "The Natural History of Human Food Sharing and Cooperation: A Review and a New Multi-Individual Approach to the Negotiation of Norms," in Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, eds., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005], 75-113.)

In contrast to hunting, gathering food (plants and small animals) shows low variance and less risk.  Those who make the effort to go gathering are usually successful.  They share this food within their family.  But they do not need to share with other families, because unlike hunting, there is no need to pool risk.

There is a third form of cooperation, in which foragers reciprocate or trade goods within their band or with people in other bands.

All of these evolved systems of cooperation are part of our evolved human nature that we still have today.  Even though most of us today have never lived as hunter-gatherers, and so we have never learned the culture of hunting-gathering society, we still have the instinctive rules of cooperation of the foraging mind that can be evoked as cultural patterns of behavior when environmental cues activate specific evolved mechanisms (see 8:37 in the video).

Consequently, socialism can appeal to us today by evoking the evolved rules of sharing for risk pooling.  But this is a "mismatch" in that these rules evolved for sharing among small bands of hunters for which the rules were adaptive, but these rules are maladaptive for large modern societies in which people are interacting anonymously with thousands or millions of people.  Trying to organize a large modern economy in a socialist system based on the generalized generosity of sharing fails.

Cosmides seems to suggest, therefore, that Hayek was right to see socialism as failing because of this mismatch.  But she also suggests that Hayek was wrong to present capitalism or the extended order of markets as a purely cultural artifact that must repress the evolved instincts of human nature, because he failed to see how capitalism could be understood as evoking the evolved system of cooperation through social exchange or trade.  In contrast to Cosmides, Hayek seemed to present capitalism as a "culturally-accumulated package of norms gradually acquired via content-free learning and imitation" (12:33).  Against Hayek, Cosmides argues that different instinctive rules can be triggered by the experience of different environmental cues, so that capitalist institutional cues can trigger trading behavior for mutually beneficial exchange. While Hayek argued that there was no evidence for trading behavior earlier than a few thousand years ago, after the emergence of agriculture, Cosmides seems to see evidence for trading going far back into ancient foraging bands.  Actually, Hayek occasionally conceded that there was archaeological evidence for long-distance trade in the Paleolithic age at least 30,000 years ago (The Fatal Conceit, 38-42).

Similarly, in Tooby's speech, he observed that "vast market-based economic systems exploit for their amazing productivity one cognitive system that evolved to handle explicit contingent exchange (the social exchange system)," and that "the effects of most other psychological mechanisms terminate locally (parenting, love, friendship), but explicit exchange can extend far beyond individual perception globally through the miracle of markets" (38:40).  For our foraging ancestors, trade or explicit exchange was "only a minor part of economic life," which is still true for us today in our personal lives, but today explicit exchange has become a major part of our economic life.

Tooby and Cosmides have made this same point in a recent article: "The dazzlingly extended forms of modern cooperation we see today (Adam Smith's division of labor supporting globe-spanning trade) appear differentially built out of adaptations for small-scale sociality that modularly scale, such as exchange--rather than the marginal benevolence of Smith's butcher, brewer, and baker" ("Human Cooperation Shows the Distinctive Signatures of Adaptations to Small-Scale Social Life," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, January, 2016).  So they seem to say that Smith was right about the "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another" being a evolved "propensity of human nature."  And even if this propensity to exchange was only a small part of the economics of ancient foraging bands, it could be evoked in the modern world of the global market order to sustain the liberal social order.

Haidt makes this point again at the beginning of his speech: "We evolved to do tribalism and trade" (51:14).  Living within families and small groups, we are collectivists in evoking the social instincts of our foraging mind.  But in the extended order of markets, we are traders in evoking the foraging instincts for social exchange.  The expansion of trading networks over the past five thousand years and the explosive expansion over the past two hundred years have been cultural extensions of the innate propensities for trade.

We are also libertarians in evoking "liberty/oppression" as one of the moral foundations of our evolved human nature, Haidt argues.  Here he appeals to Christopher Boehm's account of how foragers protect their autonomy as free individuals by resistance to the dominance behavior of those who might become bullies or tyrants.  If this is part of our evolved human nature, as Boehm claims, then this would show how Adam Smith's "system of natural liberty" could be rooted in our innate instincts.

Moreover, as I have argued in some of my posts on Haidt, the moral principle of liberty can be seen as not just one of six moral foundations, as he says, but also as the one principle that secures the conditions for the full expression of the other five foundations.

Part of this is that a liberal society allows human beings to satisfy their desires for personal social bonding in civil society.  A fundamental principle of liberal thought, as Hayek emphasized, is the importance of civil society as lying between the individual and the state--a social realm in which human beings are free to express their social needs through the natural bonds of family life and the voluntary associations of life.  This allows human beings to satisfy their instinctive needs for familial and social bonding in small groups comparable to those of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

So, contrary to Hayek's insistence that the liberal social order requires the cultural repression of our evolved human nature, Cosmides, Tooby, and Haidt show how we can understand classical liberalism as securing the fullest satisfaction of our evolved natural desires.

It is remarkable, however, that it is only recently that Cosmides and Tooby have begun to publicly speak about how evolutionary psychology might support classical liberalism or libertarianism.  Over most of their career, they did not speak about this, or they even invoked the fact/value dichotomy in saying that as empirical scientists they could not endorse any normative claims about morality or politics.  But those who know Cosmides and Tooby well have known that from a young age they were classical liberals in their thinking, and much influenced by free market thinkers like Hayek.  Cosmides has said that she was influenced by reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as a young woman. 

Their reason for being quiet about this until recently is suggested by Tooby's casual remark at the beginning of his statement: he says that the topic--"Socialism and Human Nature"--is "fascinating" but "potentially career-ending."  In other words, Tooby and Cosmides have not spoken publicly about this until now because in earlier years they would have been risking the failure of their academic careers by arguing for classical liberalism, which would have shocked their academic colleagues; but now that they have become successful in their academic reputations, they can come out as classical liberals. 

The turning point might have been in 2008 when they wrote an entry on "Evolutionary Psychology" for The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism published by the Cato Institute.  They probably would not have done this earlier in their career.

Some of my other posts on Cosmides and Tooby are here, here. and here. Posts on Haidt are here, here., and here.