Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
Donald Trump's Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a reminder of the importance of personality in political life. This should draw attention to the biological science of political psychology, which includes the biological study of nonhuman animal personalities as showing the evolutionary roots of the personality traits manifest in U.S. presidents and other political actors.
Psychologists have identified two different dimensions of the narcissistic personality--grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. Trump is obviously a grandiose narcissist.
Psychologists have studied grandiose narcissism among U.S. Presidents. Here's the abstract for one study (Watts et al. 2013):
"Recent research and theorizing suggest that narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors. We tested this hypothesis with data on the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including George W. Bush, using (a) expert-derived narcissism estimates, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential performance, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance. Grandiose, but not vulnerable, narcissism was associated with superior overall greatness in an aggregate poll; it was also positively associated with public persuasiveness, crisis management, agenda setting, and allied behaviors, and with several objective indicators of performance, such as winning the popular vote and initiating legislation. Nevertheless, grandiose narcissism was also associated with several negative outcomes, including congressional impeachment resolutions and unethical behaviors. We found that presidents exhibit elevated levels of grandiose narcissism compared with the general population, and that presidents' grandiose narcissism has been rising over time. Our findings suggest that grandiose narcissism may be a double-edged sword in the leadership domain."
This study built upon the data set of Rubenzer and Faschingbauer (2004), who had 121 expert raters (such as historians and psychologists who have studied the lives of the U.S. presidents) evaluate the personality of the 41 U.S. presidents up to and including Bill Clinton. Watts et al. (2013) added ratings of George W. Bush from a previous study. They were then able to rank the first 42 presidents for their grandiose narcissism. Here are the top seven:
1. Lyndon Johnson 2. Teddy Roosevelt 3. Andrew Jackson 4. Franklin D. Roosevelt 5. John Kennedy 6. Richard Nixon 7. Bill Clinton
This suggests that Trump's grandiose narcissistic personality is not unique among the U.S. presidents, although we might wonder whether Trump manifests a more extreme form of this personality than any other president. Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us. After all, shouldn't we expect that the sort of person who would have the driving ambition for power that would motivate him to successfully win the presidency would often have the traits of a grandiose narcissist--such as fearless dominance?
These same personality traits can be seen in other political animals. I have written about the biology of animal personalities (here), and particularly chimpanzee personalities (here). For me, this shows that any biopolitical science needs to include the biological biographies of the individual animals in any political community. The biological study of the political life of any animal community must include not only the genetic history of the species and the cultural history of the community, but also the individual history of the political actors in the community, with each individual having distinct personality traits.
Now, a new article (Weiss et al. 2017) presents a study of the personality traits of the chimpanzees in the Kasekela and Mitumba communities of Gombe National Park in Tanzania. The New York Times has an article on this study.
The method for identifying the personality traits of these chimpanzees was essentially the same as that used for studying the personalities of U.S. presidents. The personalities of 128 chimpanzees in Gombe were rated on 24 items from the "Hominoid Personality Questionaire," which is a slightly modified version of questionaires used to rate the personality of human beings as following the "five-factor-model" of personality based on five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN). The ratings were made by the Tanzanian field assistants who have observed the chimpanzees at Gombe almost daily for over 30 years.
For each of the 24 items, the raters were asked to rate a chimpanzee on a seven point scale from low to high. Each item was stated as an adjective along with one or two descriptive sentences. Here are some examples:
"FEARFUL: Subject reacts excessively to real or imagined threats by displaying behaviors such as screaming, grimacing, running away or other signs of anxiety or distress."
"DOMINANT: Subject is able to displace, threaten, or take food from other chimpanzees. Or subject may express high status by decisively intervening in social interactions."
"RECKLESS: Subject is rash or unconcerned about the consequences of its behaviors."
"THOUGHTLESS: Subject often behaves in a way that seems imprudent or forgetful."
"VULNERABLE: Subject is prone to be physically or emotionally hurt as a result of dominance displays, highly assertive behavior, aggression, or attack by another chimpanzee."
"BULLYING: Subject is overbearing and intimidating towards younger or lower ranking chimpanzees."
"AGGRESSIVE: Subject often initiates fights or other menacing and agonistic encounters with other chimpanzees."
"IMPULSIVE: Subject often displays some spontaneous or sudden behavior that could not have been anticipated. There often seems to be some emotional reason behind the sudden behavior."
These ratings were statistically analyzed for "interrater reliability"--that is, the degree to which the ratings of the same chimp by different raters agree. For most of the items, the interrater reliabilities ranged from acceptable to good.
There are three important conclusions from this study. First, this confirms that, like other animals that have been studied, these chimps really do show individual personalities. Second, the patterns in the personalities of these wild chimps are similar to those found among captive chimps in zoos or study facilities. Finally, this shows remarkable similarities in personality traits between these chimps and human beings, which suggests an evolutionary continuity in personality traits.
Notice how some of the items in the above list apply to Trump. Dominant? Reckless? Thoughtless? Bullying? Aggressive? Impulsive? I have written some posts on "Trump's Chimpanzee Politics" (here and here).
Notice also that the study of presidents found a connection between grandiose narcissism and impeachment resolutions and unethical behavior. If Trump is impeached by the Congress, or if the Cabinet uses the 25th Amendment to declare him "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," we will have to decide whether Trump's personality traits are so dangerous for the country that he should be removed from office.
Can the president's authority to launch nuclear strikes with thousands of nuclear warheads be trusted to someone with the most extreme form of grandiose narcissism, perhaps even more extreme than Lyndon Johnson or any other previous president? Or should the Congress declare that the president has no constitutional authority to launch a preemptive attack without a congressional declaration of war? REFERENCES
Rubenzer, S. J., and T. R. Faschingbauer. 2004. Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents. Brassey's Inc.
Watts, Ashley, et al. 2013. "The Double-Edged Sword of Grandiose Narcissism: Implications for Successful and Unsuccessful Leadership Among U.S. Presidents." Psychological Science 24: 2379-2389.
Weiss, Alexander, Michael Wilson, D. Anthony Collins, Deus Mjungu, Shadrack Kamenya, Steffen Foerster, and Anne E. Pusey. 2017. "Personality in the Chimpanzees of Gombe National Park." Scientific Data 4, article number: 170146.
I have often argued against Friedrich Hayek's claim that socialism appeals to our evolved instincts, as shaped by our evolutionary history in hunter-gatherer bands, and therefore that capitalism requires a cultural repression of those natural instincts. In making that argument, I have disputed the common assumption that the "mismatch" theory of evolutionary psychology supports Hayek's claim.
I have argued that evolutionary anthropology sustains the conclusion that a capitalist liberal culture appeals to the evolved human instincts for social exchange or trade and for the liberty expressed as resistance to oppression that can be seen in hunter-gatherer bands. Adam Smith was right to see that the "system of natural liberty" is rooted in our innate instincts and that the opulence that results from exchange and specialization is the necessary consequence of "a certain propensity in human nature . . . the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and anthropologists like Richard Lee have been mistaken in believing that "our ancestors were communists" (Lee 1991, 255). Actually, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were "the original libertarians" (Mayor 2012).
And yet Hayek's socialism-as-evolutionary-atavism thesis continues to be defended by scholars who think about the evolutionary psychology of economics. In recent years, Paul Rubin has contended that "folk economics"--the intuitive economics of ordinary people with no training in economics--shows what he calls "emporiophobia" (the fear of markets), based on the Greek words emporion (for a trading market) and phobia (for fear). And he sees this as showing the evolved human nature that was shaped by evolution in ancient hunter-gatherer bands (Rubin 2003, 2014). Now, Pascal Boyer and Michael Bang Petersen have elaborated Rubin's reasoning in an article accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Boyer and Petersen 2017). Here we can see the theoretical rigor and empirical evidence supporting Hayek's thesis that Hayek himself never provided.
According to Rubin, folk economics is mistaken in seeing the economic world as a zero-sum world in which a gain for one person must be a loss for someone else, while economists correctly understand that economic exchange can be positive-sum in showing the gains from trade, so that in any voluntary economic transaction, both sides benefit. Folk economics arises from instinctive intuitions that evolved in our hunter-gatherer ancestors living in a world without specialization, division of labor, capital investment, or economic growth--a world without markets. The mismatch between that Paleolithic world without markets and the modern world of extended trade in markets explains the mistakes of folk economic thinking in its assumption that markets are bad.
So, for example, folk economics assumes that international free trade is bad, because if foreigners are profiting from trading with us, we are losing out in that this creates unemployment at home. For another example, people often say "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer," which implies that the rich have caused the poverty of the poor by outcompeting them. Again, the fundamental assumption is that free markets must create zero-sum competition with winners and losers.
To see the mistakes in folk economics, people need to be taught economic science. Unfortunately, Rubin observes, the teaching of economics stresses market competition rather than market cooperation. To show this, he surveys some of the leading textbooks in economics, and he points out that there are far more references to competition than to cooperation. This reinforces the assumption of folk economics that markets always require competition, with winners and losers, and so we need to restrict or regulate markets to promote cooperation rather than competition.
To overcome this, Rubin proposes changing the way economics is taught, so as to stress cooperation rather than competition. In fact, the fundamental insight of economics is that every economic transaction is cooperative, because all parties expect to benefit from a transaction, otherwise they would not agree to it, and therefore it's a act of mutually beneficial cooperation. Of course, competition is essential, but only as a tool facilitating cooperation. Competition sets terms for cooperation and selects the best partners for cooperation. When economic agents compete with one another, they are competing for the right to cooperate with others. The most successful competitor is the one who is most successful in cooperating with others--either by selling to more buyers or buying from more sellers. When people are taught to understand this, they will see that markets are fundamentally cooperative rather than competitive, which dispels the fear of markets as bad or immoral in promoting a destructive competition in society, a fear that arises from evolved instincts that distort the reality of markets in the modern world
Boyer and Petersen extend and deepen Rubin's reasoning by laying out an evolutionary cognitive model that specifies how cognitive systems that evolved in ancestral hunter-gatherer bands now shape the fear of markets in folk economics. They present eight examples of folk-economic beliefs.
1. International trade is zero-sum, has negative effects.
2. Immigrants steal jobs.
3. Immigrants abuse the welfare system.
4. Necessary social welfare programs are abused by scroungers.
5. Markets have negative social impact ("emporiophobia").
6. The profit motive is detrimental to general welfare.
7. Labor is the source of value.
8. Price-regulation has the intended effects.
Each of these beliefs can be explained as connected to an evolved cognitive bias. For example, the belief that international trade must be zero-sum can be seen as arising from the evolved cognitive propensity for forming coalitions in competition with other coalitions. The evolved human mind is inclined to identify nations as competing coalitions, and therefore we are inclined to believe that when foreign nations benefit from trading with us, our nation is harmed, because if the other nations are winning, we are losing. (Doesn't this remind us of Donald Trump's rhetoric against free trade?)
But even if this explains the folk-economic beliefs of ordinary people that show fear of markets, it does not explain the economic behavior of these people that shows endorsement of markets. Most of those Americans who condemn international free trade as unfair to America are happy to shop at WalMart and buy imported Chinese goods if they think they are the best products for the price.
Rubin recognizes this when he quotes Frederic Bastiat as saying "each man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or exchanging according as he finds it more advantageous to do the one or the other" (Rubin 2003, 167). So while Rubin complains that the economic beliefs of ordinary people show ignorance of economics, he sees that in practice people show themselves to be excellent economists!
The quotation from Bastiat comes from his discussion of theory and practice in the debate between the proponents of free trade and the proponents of protectionism. The theorists of free trade say: "It is better to buy from another what it would be more costly to make oneself." The theorists of protectionism say: "It is better to make things oneself, even if it would be less expensive to buy them from another." Bastiat points out that only the first assertion enjoys the support of universal practice. That's why the theorists of protectionism want to use coercion to compel people to produce what they would find more advantageous to purchase.
While the theory of protectionism is contrary to practice, Bastiat observes, the theory of free trade is "so little opposed to practice that it is nothing else than practice explained." So what he means in saying that "each man is in practice an excellent economist" is that "everyone gains a knowledge of this science through experience; or rather, the science itself is only this same experience accurately observed and methodically interpreted" (Bastiat 1968, 84).
Human beings show in their behavior a practical understanding of why markets are good, because of the gains from trade, which does not require any formal training in economic theory. And this practical understanding of markets shows how the institutions of capitalism can elicit the evolved propensities of the human mind for cooperation through trading or exchange. This is why, against Hayek, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have argued that evolved 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. Or, as Tooby has put it, "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 "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."
This suggests that there are evolved cognitive systems that promote market behavior, and so Adam Smith was right about there being a natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.
Boyer and Petersen recognize that folk economic beliefs "do not govern people's economic behavior," because people "who say that markets are 'bad' may still behave as roughly rational agents in markets, and they may even detect the advantages of competition in their everyday economic behavior" (5, 32-33). Boyer and Petersen recognize that people have folk-economic beliefs that are "incompatible with their own behavior in markets," and they cannot explain this: "the actual connections between micro-processes of economic decision-making on the one hand, and folk-economic beliefs on the other, remain unexplored" (39, 41).
Boyer and Petersen do not consider the possibility that even though people untrained in economics often do not have a good intellectual understanding of markets, they do have a good practical understanding of why markets are good, as manifest in their economic behavior, and this shows how the cognitive system for social exchange that evolved among our ancestral hunter-gatherers can be elicited in modern capitalist environments to sustain extended market behavior.
That this is the case is indicated by the remarkable triumph of capitalism over socialism in the past 150 years. After V. I. Lenin led the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917, he set out the next year to leap directly into pure socialism by abolishing all buying and selling in markets and having all economic activity controlled by governmental planning, which was called "war communism" (Richman 1981). This produced an economic disaster. If Russia did not totally collapse, it was only because the natural human impulse towards markets could not be completely suppressed, and so most of the economic activity went underground into illegal black markets. By 1921, in response to popular uprisings that threatened to overthrow the regime, Lenin publicly admitted the failure of war communism, and he announced the "New Economic Policy," which legalized buying and selling in markets.
Never again have socialists tried to totally abolish markets. They have tried to severely restrict markets, but even that has been subverted by people going into illegal markets. In some countries today, most of the economic activity is in underground markets that evade governmental controls and taxation.
Even those European countries that are regarded as most successful in their socialism--such as the Nordic social democracies--are not really socialist but rather welfare state capitalist systems. As I have argued in some posts (here and here), these countries rank high on the Human Freedom Index, which includes economic freedom for markets.
It is hard to explain this if one assumes that human beings have evolved instincts to fear markets and love socialism, because "our ancestors were communists." It is easier to explain if one assumes that human beings have evolved instincts for liberty and a propensity to truck, barter, and exchange, because our ancestors were "the original libertarians."
REFERENCES
Bastiat, Frederic. 1968. Economic Sophisms. Trans. Arthur Goddard. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education.
Boyer, Pascal, and Michael Bang Petersen. 2017. "Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model." Behavioral and Brain Sciences (forthcoming). Available online.
Lee, Richard B. 1991. "Reflections on Primitive Communism." In Hunters and Gatherers: History, Evolution, and Social Change, eds.Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, pp. 252-68. New York: Berg.
Mayor, Thomas. 2012. "Hunter-Gatherers, The Original Libertarians." The Independent Review 16 (Spring): 485-500. Available online.
Richman, Sheldon. 1981. "War Communism to NEP: The Road from Serfdom." The Journal of Libertarian Studies 5 (Winter): 89-97. Available online.
Rubin, Paul H. 2003. "Folk Economics." Southern Economic Journal 70: 157-71.
Rubin, Paul H. 2014. "Emporiophobia (Fear of Markets): Cooperation or Competition?" Southern Economic Journal 80: 875-89.
A COMMENT FROM BOYER
After reading this post, Pascal Boyer sent me the following comment:
I just read your blog post and must say I agree with most or all of it.
But of course (when were academics happy with what other people say about their work?), I must say I am worried that you write:
Boyer and Petersen do not consider the possibility that even though people untrained in economics often do not have a good intellectual understanding of markets, they do have a good practical understanding of why markets are good, as manifest in their economic behavior, and this shows how the cognitive system for social exchange that evolved among our ancestral hunter-gatherers can be elicited in modern capitalist environments to sustain extended market behavior.
We not only consider that possibility, we make it explicit, and even reiterate it at several points in the paper, e.g.:
In this regard, it is important to note, again, that emporiophobia is a matter of stated, explicit beliefs, which may or may not reflect the intuitive principles that actually guide people’s economic behavior. People who say that markets are “bad”, may still behave as roughly rational agents in markets, and they may even detect the advantages of competition in their everyday economic behavior. But, if asked whether a given domain of activity should be left to a market of competitors, or when asked the extent to which markets should be regulated, they readily express the view that market outcomes are socially detrimental.
But, OK, the point was buried in the text and should have been made more salient. It is in fact a really fascinating problem: most people will routinely accept that having two butchers in their town is better than having one, and yet, will opine that ‘markets’ should not ‘dictate’ economic activity. Understanding how this inconsistency can be sustained is difficult but necessary.
REPLY TO BOYER
I now see that I was mistaken in writing "Boyer and Peterson do not consider the possibility that . . ." I should have written "Boyer and Peterson thus recognize that . . ."
I actually quote from the passage in Boyer and Peterson's paper that Boyer quotes here.
I agree with Boyer's closing comment: "the point was buried in the text and should have been made more salient."
In 1987, Robert Sapolsky was the recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grants." Some years later, he received a letter from the Foundation asking him to submit some Big Ideas for a funding initiative. The letter said something like "Send us a provocative idea, something you'd never propose to another foundation because they'd label you crazy."
So he sent them a proposal titled "Should the Criminal Justice System Be Abolished?" He argued that the answer was clearly yes, because neuroscience had proven that all human conduct is biologically determined, and therefore there is no free will, which means that the criminal justice system is wrong in holding people morally responsible for their behavior. When the Foundation accepted this proposal and organized a conference on this, Sapolsky and other neuroscientists began debating lawyers, law professors, and judges, who tried to defend the standards of legal responsibility against Sapolsky's claim that those standards are unscientific in so far as they assume free will. As a result of this conference, the Foundation has funded a general program for "neurolaw"--applying neuroscience to the study of law--and one of the primary issues has continued to be this debate over whether neuroscience justifies abolishing a legal system that assumes the reality of free will.
Ah yes, many of my critics would say, don't you see here, Arnhart, that this is the disastrous consequence of your biological science of human nature--biological determinism denies the concept of free will that supports our legal and moral judgments of human responsibility? The only way to avoid this, they insist, is to recognize that human beings have a spiritual capacity for free will that transcends their biological nature and for which there is no natural biological explanation.
In response to this criticism, I have argued that 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 (see my posts here,here,here,here,here, and here).
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 "deliberate choice" (proairesis)
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.
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.
Sapolsky has debated Morse, and in Behave, he explains why he thinks Morse fails in his account of "mitigated free will" as compatible with the science of human behavioral biology. I am now wondering whether the compatibilism that Morse and I share can be defended against Sapolsky's critique.
Sapolsky observes that there are three ways of viewing the influence of human biology on human behavior. (1) We have complete free will in our behavior, because our behavior is always freely chosen, and it is never biologically caused. (2) We have no free will, because our behavior is never freely chosen, and it is always biologically caused. (3) Our behavior is somewhere in between these two extremes.
Almost no one takes the first position, because almost all of us recognize that sometimes people are compelled by biological causes to behave in ways that we have not freely chosen. So, for example, in 1842, Daniel M'Naghten tried to assassinate British prime minister Robert Peel, and instead he killed Peel's private secretary, Edward Drummond. He had been convinced that the Tories were persecuting him and even trying to murder him. For years, he had heard voices telling him that Peel was spying on him. He felt compelled to kill Peel. At the trial, a doctor testified that he was insane. Today, we would say he suffered from some form of paranoid psychosis. He was declared innocent by reason of insanity, and for the rest of his life he was in insane asylums. His case became the basis of the "M'Naghten rule" that someone can be innocent by reason of insanity if, at the time of the crime, the person is so "laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind," that he cannot distinguish right from wrong.
In Anglo-American law, this shows the limits of free will when a diseased mind creates a compulsion that drives someone to commit a crime for which they are not fully responsible.
But as our scientific knowledge of the natural causes of behavior grows, Sapolsky observes, we can see that not just brain diseases like this but all human behaviors have natural biological causes. And if all of our behavior is naturally caused, then we don't have free will, because we cannot act outside of the naturally causal world known to natural science. So Sapolsky takes the second position--that there is no free will at all.
But Sapolsky admits that most human beings--or at least most of those who have thought deeply about this problem of free will--take the third position--that there is some middle ground between complete free will and no free will. This is the position that the determinism of natural causes can be compatible with a limited free will.
Those like Morse (and me) who defend compatibilism claim that human beings can have a natural freedom of choice that is not a free will understood as uncaused cause, and therefore this natural freedom is compatible with the determinism of natural cause. Sapolsky denies this is possible, because he believes that any notion of human freedom must tacitly assume some kind of spiritual or immaterial power acting as uncaused cause.
Morse distinguishes between causation and compulsion. The fact that all of our behavior is caused does not mean that all of it is compelled. When we freely choose to think or act, what we do has been caused by our beliefs and desires, but this causation is not compulsion, and so we can be held legally or morally responsible for this.
Sapolsky responds: "But try as I might, I cannot see any way of making this distinction that does not tacitly require a homunculus that is outside the causal universe, a homunculus that can be overwhelmed by 'compulsion' but that can and should handle 'causation'" (600).
Although the compatibilists deny that they are metaphysical dualists, in fact, they really are, at least implicitly:
"There's the brain--neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brain-specific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone's prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It's the whole shebang, all of this book."
"And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother's admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck."
"And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview--seizures blow the homunculus's fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer's disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock."
"But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science" (588).
In reply to this reductio ad absurdum argument, Morse and I will say that this is a straw man--or straw homunculus--argument, because we are not claiming that freedom of choice acts outside the causal laws of nature. But Sapolsky's claim is that despite what we say, we must implicitly or tacitly invoke such a homunculus acting outside the natural world.
Now, it should be noted that in defending a biological determinism that denies free will, Sapolsky is not a reductionist; nor is he claiming that biological science can predict behavior. His biology of human behavior is a non-reductive multifactorial biology that sees behavior arising from a great multitude of factors interacting with one another, so that no single factor or set of factors acts as the single cause of the behavior. So, for instance, genes influence behavior, but they do not by themselves determine behavior, because genes by themselves do nothing, and their influence depends on the various contexts in which they work.
Moreover, since this multifactorial biology is so complex, and since our scientific knowledge of how it works is so limited, we cannot now--and perhaps cannot ever--predict any behavior exactly. We can only talk about what tends to happen on average in certain circumstances. The variability of individuals and the variability of the contexts in which they act make precise prediction impossible. We can say that people with paranoid psychosis will have some tendency to act as M'Naghten did, but he cannot say that every person with such a disease will do so.
So, if we were persuaded by Sapolsky that there is no free will or freedom of choice to support the standards of legal responsibility assumed by the criminal justice system today, then how would we have to reform the system to conform to this science of non-reductive multifactorial biological determinism?
Sapolsky says we should draw three conclusions--one is easy to see, one is hard to implement, and the third is almost impossible to achieve.
First, it should be easy to see that a legal system that denies free will would not have to allow dangerous people to roam freely in society and create havoc. Of course, we need to protect ourselves from dangerous people, even though those dangerous people are acting under the disordered compulsions of their brains. Here Sapolsky's neuroscience would not make any difference for the criminal justice system: we would continue to separate criminals from the rest of society for the protection of society.
But, then, the second conclusion is a little harder to adopt: if we deny free will, then we can punish dangerous people by removing them from society, but we cannot see this punishment as justly deserved, as virtuous retribution for their immoral behavior. It should not feel good to punish. We cannot rightly feel that those we punish have earned their punishment.
The third conclusion, Sapolsky admits, is perhaps impossible to put into practice. If we deny free will, then we cannot blame people for their bad behavior. But it also follows that we cannot praise them for their good behavior, nor can we feel proud of ourselves for our good behavior. For, if there is no free will, then no one deserves to be either praised or blamed.
It will be almost impossible for human beings to accept this. So Sapolsky concedes:
"I can't really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we'll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters--when we judge others harshly" (613).
"Our homuncular myths are benign," it seems, when we praise others for their accomplishments, but not when we judge others harshly.
It is not clear to me that Sapolsky can consistently deny human freedom of choice. After all, his whole book Behave isan effort to persuade people to freely change the way they think and act--to see how the science of human behavioral biology can help them choose to create a world that is less violent, more peaceful, less vicious, and more virtuous than it is now. He must conclude "that there is hope, that things can change, that we can be changed, that we personally can cause change" (648).
"That we can personally cause change"? Well, yes, if we believe that we have the natural freedom to cause change. But not if we believe that we have no such freedom.
Presumably, Sapolsky has written his book to try to persuade his readers with his arguments, and if he succeeds, this will change the neural circuitry in their frontal cortex and other parts of their brains in ways that can then exert some causal influence towards changing their behavior. He is not trying to persuade a homunculus who can act as an uncaused cause. Rather, he is trying to persuade those brain mechanisms that have the natural causal power to change behavior. That is not free will. That is the natural human freedom of choice.
In his interview on "The Daily Show" with Trevor Noah, Robert Sapolsky showed his liberal bias in how he reports the research on the biological influences on political ideology. It's the same liberal bias that one sees among most of the social psychologists and political scientists reporting this research. That's why Jonathan Haidt has argued that the only way to overcome this liberal bias is to introduce intellectual diversity into the academic world by allowing conservative and libertarian scholars to participate in this research. (I have written a post on Haidt's argument for academic toleration of conservative and libertarian scholars.)
Trevor Noah asked Sapolsky to explain his claim that the ideological differences between political progressives and political conservatives reflect deep biological differences in their psychological traits, so that "their brains are wired differently," and Noah wondered whether this led to the "frightening" conclusion that in politics people are no longer making decisions for themselves. Sapolsky responded by saying that this should not be surprising if we recognize that "we're biological organisms," and so, of course, our biological nature is going to influence our political beliefs.
Sapolsky then referred to what he called "one of my favorite studies in the whole book." If you put people in a room with a smelly garbage can, they become more socially conservative, in that they are more likely to decide that a social practice that is different from our own is not just different but morally wrong. In his book, he refers to this study on page 453 (n. 44). The title of the article he is citing is "Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men" (Inbar et al. 2011).
Sapolsky went on to say that this is part of the research showing that social conservatives on average have a lower threshold for disgust, and the disgust reaction is seen in the activity in the part of the brain called the insula. The insula was originally evolved to react negatively to bad tasting food or bad smells, but then later in our evolution, this brain mechanism for gustatory or olfactory disgust was appropriated for moral disgust: rotten acts create a "bad taste in our mouth."
Sapolsky and Noah could then laugh at conservatives for being driven by irrational emotions of disgust, while implying that liberals or progressives are rational people who use their reason to control the emotions that are uncontrolled among conservatives.
Liberal bias has introduced two kinds of distortion here. The first is the silence about libertarianism as an alternative to liberalism and conservatism. Sapolsky is silent about the research by Haidt and his colleagues (Iyer et al., 2012) showing that libertarians have a lower threshold for disgust than do either conservatives or liberals, and that libertarians are far more cerebral in their moral judgments. I have pointed this out in the previous post.
One might try to defend Sapolsky here by saying that his 10-minute interview with Noah was too short to bring up all the complications in this research. But that defense won't work, because in his book (almost 800 pages long!), Sapolsky devotes only one sentence to libertarianism (446), and it's a curt, and untrue, dismissal of libertarianism as lacking any consistency.
The second kind of distortion is the false assumption that liberals are so purely rational that they do not show moral disgust or any other moral emotion. That this is false is evident to anyone who actually reads the article about the smelly garbage can experiment that Sapolsky cites.
Here's the abstract for the paper: "An induction of disgust can lead to more negative attitudes toward an entire social group. Participants who were exposed to a noxious ambient odor reported less warmth toward gay men. This effect of disgust was equally strong for political liberals and conservatives, and was specific to attitudes toward gay men--there was only a weak effect of disgust on people's warmth toward lesbians, and no consistent effect on attitudes toward African Americans, the elderly, or a range of political issues" (Inbar et al., 2011, 23).
So the effect of disgust toward gay men (relative to heterosexual men) was "equally strong for political liberals and conservatives"! Neither in his television interview nor in his book does Sapolsky mention this, because it would weaken his claim that liberals are not motivated by the moral disgust that motivates conservatives.
Now it is true that political liberals are more likely than political conservatives to say that one should not rely on feelings of disgust when making moral judgments (Graham, Haidt, and Nosek, 2009), and it is true that political liberals generally express a higher respect for homosexuals than do political conservatives. But what this experiment with the smelly garbage can suggests is that political liberals can be influenced by the subtle effects of disgust just as conservatives are. And keep in mind that libertarians are probably much less influenced by moral disgust towards homosexuals than are either liberals or conservatives.
If one agrees with those social psychologists who have argued that political orientation is deeply influenced by emotional intuitions rooted in evolutionary foundations--perhaps Haidt's six moral foundations--then one should expect that liberals are just as strongly motivated by their emotional intuitions as are conservatives or libertarians (Haidt 2012). Even if one agrees with those like Joshua Greene (2013) who argue that moral judgment shows a complex interaction of intuitive emotion and deliberate reasoning, one would expect that even liberals who claim to be guided by pure reason must be motivated by emotional dispositions. (My series of posts on Greene begin here.)
So, for example, consider the liberal opposition to genetically modified food (GM) in the United States. Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans are opposed to GM. And of those, most are so absolutely opposed that they say GM should be prohibited regardless of what the evidence might be as to risks and benefits. This is remarkable, especially since there is a scientific consensus that GM is no more risky than food that has not been genetically modified, and the benefits of GM are clear, particularly for the less well off in the developing world. Scott et al. (2016) have shown, from a survey of U.S. representative of the population, that those who are absolutely opposed to GM are more disgust sensitive in general and more disgusted by the consumption of GM than those who are not absolutist in their opposition to GM and those who are supporters. Social liberals and social conservatives are equally motivated by their moral disgust to oppose GM. Scott et al. (2016, 322) explain:
". . . In the case of GM, we believe that disgust-based moral intuitions are grounded in intuitions about contamination and perceived violations of 'naturalness.' The current data suggest that valuing naturalness is not the exclusive province of the political left or right. . . . We believe those on the left feel more connected to nature, whereas those on the right feel stewardship over the natural world because nature is part of God's creation. If so, liberals may value nature because it is intrinsically part of a moral circle and object to any harm to wild animals or habitats. Conservatives may value nature on theological grounds and object to scientists 'playing God' by disregarding the prescribed relationship between man and the natural world."
If this is correct--that liberals and conservatives are equally motivated by moral disgust in their opposition to GM--then Martha Nussbaum (2004) is wrong in her claim that disgust is an "illiberal emotion."
Okay, some liberals might say, maybe in our opposition to GM we do allow our disgust reactions to overwhelm our reason, but on most issues our reason rules over our passions, unlike those poor social conservatives who allow their irrational emotions to control all of their moral and political positions. On the contrary, there is evidence that across a wide range of issues, liberals are motivated by moral emotions.
The most sacred value for liberals is caring for the victims of oppression and unfairness. Consequently, they think government should intervene in the economy to protect the poor and the weak from being oppressed by the rich and the powerful. This is motivated by moral disgust elicited by what they see as oppressive or unfair conduct. In experimental game theory, studies of how the emotions of disgust are stirred by unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game, and of how this disgust arises in parts of the brain that evolved originally to react against bad food and pathogens, indicate how liberal moral disgust can be understood as an evolved reaction against unfairness and injustice (Sanfey et al., 2003; Rozin et al., 2009; Chapman et al., 2009; Moretti and Pellegrino, 2010).
Petrescu and Parkinson (2014) have shown in an experiment that inducing people to feel disgust--by presenting them with pictures designed to induce disgust--causes them to adopt left-wing positions on economic issues. For example, those feeling disgust were more likely to strongly agree with the statement that "government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off." So while conservatives are more likely to be disgusted by violations of physical and spiritual purity, liberals are more likely to be disgusted by violations of economic fairness and equality.
Another sacred value for liberals is what Haidt calls the "care/harm foundation." Human beings have an evolved disposition to care for children and protect them from harm, and this supports a general disposition to care for and protect innocent victims of violence. Human beings are thus inclined to feel moral disgust in response to violence that harms the innocent. Sapolsky himself expresses his liberal moral disgust with gun violence in the United States. He explains how the insular cortex activates when someone bites in rancid food, which induces a reflexive spitting out of the food, gagging, and perhaps vomiting. He then explains how the insula also mediates visceral responses to immoral violence:
". . . this is visceral, not just metaphorically visceral--for example, when I heard about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, 'feeling sick to my stomach' wasn't a mere figure of speech. When I imagined the reality of the murder of twenty first-graders and the six adults protecting them, I felt nauseous. The insula not only prompts the stomach to purge itself of toxic food; it prompts the stomach to purge the reality of a nightmarish event" (561).
Surely, many people have felt the same sickening moral disgust in response to the recent Las Vegas massacre; and many liberals will be motivated by this moral disgust to renew their proposals for tougher gun control laws. To counter this, conservatives will have to make rational arguments about how gun control laws don't work to stop such gun violence and about the importance of the Second Amendment in protecting the right to bear arms, even though this has the unfortunate effect of allowing some disturbed individuals to misuse their guns as Stephen Paddock did.
Here's a video of Sapolsky claiming that moral disgust is just bad evolution:
"If it makes you puke, you must rebuke" is Sapolsky's scornful way of characterizing Leon Kass's argument for the "wisdom of repugnance" (454). Or as Sapolsky says, "one day the neurons that help make you puke are suddenly involved in running the president's bioethics panel" (569). He has a great time poking fun at Kass's observation that he finds it repugnant when people display the "catlike activity" of licking ice cream cones in public (445). (Links to my long series of posts on Kass can be found here). Even if it's only conservatives like Kass who feel morally disgusted by people who lick ice cream cones in public, there's plenty of evidence that liberals feel morally disgusted by a wide range of conduct that violates the sacred values of liberalism.
Social psychologists have also shown through experiments that liberals are motivated by their fear of death to think more like conservatives (Nail et al., 2009). Reminding people of their own mortality and of the 9/11 terrorist attack increased support for President George W. Bush, both among conservatives and among liberals (Landau et al., 2004). This might explain why both liberal and conservative congressmen supported Bush's Patriot Act in 2001 and the American invasions of Afganistan and Iraq. By contrast, libertarians consistently opposed Bush's policies as threatening liberty, perhaps because libertarians feel a great passion for liberty and less fear of death.
Sapolsky is either silent about this research, or he is selective in his reporting of it, because it contradicts his story about politics as a battle of the rational liberals against the emotional conservatives.
Here's an example of his selective reporting. The article by Nail et al. (2009) is entitled "Threat Causes Liberals to Think Like Conservatives." But Sapolsky's reports it this way:
"Related to this is 'terror-management theory,' which suggests that conservatism is psychologically rooted in a pronounced fear of death; supporting this is the finding that priming people to think about their mortality makes them more conservative" (452).
He then observes: "Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality--it must be a drag being right-wing."
He is careful to hide from his readers the fact that liberals have been shown to be motivated by fear of death just like conservatives.
Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality--it must be a drag being either right-wing or left-wing.
REFERENCES
Chapman, H. A., et al. 2009. "In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust." Science 323: 1222-26.
Graham, J., J. Haidt, and B. Nosek. 2009. "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96:1029-46.
Greene, Joshua. 2013. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. New York: Penguin Press.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books.
Inbar, Yoel, David Al Pizarro, Paul Bloom. 2011. "Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men." Emotion 12: 23-27.
Iyer, Ravi, et al. 2012. "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians." PLOS ONE 7: e42366.
Landau, Mark J., et al. 2004. "Deliver Us From Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30: 1136-50.
Moretti, Laura, and Giuseppe di Pellegrino. 2010. "Disgust Selectively Modulates Reciprocal Fairness in Economic Interactions." Emotion 10: 169-180.
Nail, Paul R., et al. 2009. "Threat Causes Liberals to Think Like Conservatives." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45: 901-907.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Petrescu, Dragos C., and Brian Parkinson. 2014. "Incidental Disgust Increases Adherence to Left-Wing Economic Attitudes." Social Justice Research 27: 464-86.
Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Katrina Fincher. 2009. "From Oral to Moral." Science 323: 1179-80.
Sanfey, Alan G., et al. 2003. "The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game." Science 300: 1755-58.
Sapolsky, Robert. 2017. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin Press.
Scott, Sydney, Yoel Inbar, and Paul Rozin. 2016. "Evidence for Absolute Moral Opposition to Genetically Modified Food in the United States." Perspectives on Psychological Science 11: 315-24.
Robert Sapolsky thinks that our evolved human biology has some influence on our political ideology, in that all of us are born with genetically inclined dispositional preferences that influence our political behavior and our attitudes on specific political issues. Studies of identical twins reared apart show that if you know that one of the twins is politically conservative, you can predict that the other twin is likely to be politically conservative. So it seems that there is some genetic influence on whether one is politically conservative or liberal. Sapolsky's thinking has been shaped by studies of the evolutionary psychology of political orientation by people like Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and John Hibbing and his colleagues (444-455, 508-512).
This suggests two questions. First, what does "genetic influence" mean here? In 2008, the Journal of Politics published an article entitled "Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout," which implied a simple model in which genes directly influence political behavior. In a previous post (here), I have argued that such a simplified genetic model cannot explain or predict the emergent complexity of political animals, due to the individuality, contingency, and historicity of their behavior. Indeed, the failure to replicate the claims in that Journal of Politics article has forced the authors to retract what they said. This supports my argument that the older biopolitics movement is correct in arguing for a complex interactive biopolitical framework that is superior to the simplifying models of genopolitics proposed by Hibbing et al.
In fact, over the past five years, Hibbing et al. have moved away from the simplistic model of genopolitics in adopting the complex interactive model of biopolitical theory (see Kevin Smith, Douglas Oxley, Matthew Hibbing, John Alford, and John Hibbing, "Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology," Political Psychology 32 [2011]: 369-397). This is the model accepted by Sapolsky, who sees that the genetic influence on human behavior is almost always very indirect and dependent upon a complex interaction of many factors in a specific context (see Sapolsky's citation of Smith et al. at 445, n. 32).
Instead of a simplistic model in which genetics directly influence attitudes on specific political issues, Hibbing et al. now propose a complex model that moves through six stages with environmental factors influencing five of these stages. Here are the six stages: (1) genetics, (2) biological systems, (3) cognition/emotion information processing biases, (4) personality and values, (5) ideology, and (6) attitudes on specific political issues. The environment influences stages 2 through 6. Each of these stages has many interacting factors. So, for example, (5) ideology includes not just political ideology but also many other kinds of preferences for religion, educational styles, occupation, styles of art, child rearing, music, leisure pursuits, types of humor, and more. Political ideology is defined as "preferences for bedrock issues of social organization."
In effect, Hibbing et al. and Sapolsky have embraced what I have called "biopolitical science," which is a science that moves through three levels of deep history: the natural history of the political species, the cultural history of a political community, and the biographical history of political actors in a community. I have illustrated this by discussing Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation at these three levels. Such a biopolitical science would have to include all of human behavioral biology (as surveyed by Sapolsky in Behave) as well as all of the traditional fields of political science and political history. Hey, I've never said this was going to be easy! This has been the subject of various posts.
For Hibbing et al., the crucial factor in this complex model is political ideology understood as "preferences for bedrock issues of social organization," which assumes that there are some universal principles of social organization that were shaped in the ancient environments of human evolutionary adaptation, so that the "bedrock issues" are not as transient as the specific political issues that happen to arise at particular points in time for particular communities. So, for example, the current debate in the United States over the Affordable Care Act is a historically unique event in American political history. But underlying this debate, there should be some enduring "bedrock issues" that explain the ideological divisions in this debate, so that liberal Democrats tend to support Obamacare, and conservative Republicans tend to oppose it.
This leads to the second question raised by the evolutionary psychology of political orientation: How exactly should we understand the evolutionarily bedrock spectrum of political ideology? Traditionally, American political scientists have mapped the spectrum of political ideology along a single dimension from left to right, liberal to conservative. Although the terminology of "liberal" and "conservative" is in many ways unique to the recent history of American political culture, Hibbing et al. think that this left/right or liberal/conservative dichotomy taps into "bedrock issues of social organization" that could have been shaped by the ancient social evolution of the human species. Sapolsky agrees.
But doesn't this give us another implausibly simplistic model that cannot account for the complex diversity of evolved political ideology? Isn't it hard to see how the complexity of political thought and behavior could be reduced to two categories at opposite ends of one dimension--the political left or the political right--or perhaps three categories if we include the political center? At the very least, I will argue, we need to recognize libertarianism (or classical liberalism) as a position that is neither purely liberal nor purely conservative, a position that is ignored by Sapolsky and by Hibbing et al.
The political metaphor of "left" and "right" originated in the French Revolution of 1789, when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the King and the Church who sat to the right of the President and supporters of the Revolution who sat to his left (see Marcel Gauchet, "Right and Left," in Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, eds., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, 241-300 [Columbia University Press, 1996]).
Against the claim that this traditional left/right dichotomy is no longer applicable to political debate today, Norberto Bobbio has contended that these terms "left" and "right" are fundamental, in that the left promotes equality, while the right promotes inequality; and this split between those favoring human equality and those favoring human inequality is an enduring political debate, rooted in the experience of human beings as both naturally equal, as members of the same human species, and naturally unequal, as showing individual diversity in their traits and propensities.
Bobbio writes: "right and left . . . indicate opposing programs in relation to many problems whose solution is part of everyday political activity. These contrasts concern not only ideas, but also interests and judgments on which direction society should be moving in; they exist in all societies, and it is not apparent how they could disappear" (Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction [University of Chicago Press, 1996], 3.
Hibbing et al. quote this passage from Bobbio (Smith et al., 379). But they ignore his point that a full accounting of political ideology requires seeing two dimensions of political thought--not just left/right (or equality/inequality) but also liberty/authoritarianism. Combining these two dimensions, Bobbio claims, creates at least four categories. The extreme left (such as Marxist totalitarianism) represents egalitarian authoritarianism. The moderate left (such as liberal socialism) represents egalitarian libertarianism. The moderate right (such as American and European conservatism) represents antiegalitarian libertarianism. The extreme right (such as Fascism and Nazism) represents antiegalitarian authoritarianism.
But notice the incoherence in some of these positions. Egalitarian authoritarianism is self-contradictory. Bobbio admits this when he says that the "egalitarian utopia" of the extreme left "turned into its opposite," when the party vanguard became the new ruling class (82).
Notice also that Bobbio does not recognize libertarianism as a distinct position. Similarly, Sapolsky passes over libertarianism quickly with the claim that this cannot be a consistent ideology, because "libertarians are a mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism" (447), and because he agrees with Hibbing et al. that liberalism and conservatism are the only consistent ideologies. Neither Sapolsky nor Hibbing et al. respond to the claim of libertarians that they are fully consistent in the commitment to liberty--both economic liberty and personal liberty--while liberals and conservatives are self-contradictory in accepting one form of liberty but not the other, so that liberals and conservatives are partly libertarian and partly authoritarian.
The insistence of Sapolsky and Hibbing et al. that everyone is either liberal or conservative, left or right, requires that everyone be forced to make dichotomous choices about the "bedrock issues of social organization." Hibbing et al. have done this by using a "Society Works Best Instrument" (Smith et al., 390-91). People are given a series of 14 binary choices about how "Society works best when . . ." Amazingly, they ask about how "society" works best, but they ask nothing about "government" or "the state"; and so they make it impossible to distinguish between the natural and voluntary associations in civil society and the coercive power of government.
Here are some examples. "Society works best when . . . 1. Those who break the rules are punished. 2. Those who break the rules are forgiven. 1. Every member contributes. 2. More fortunate members sacrifice to help others. 1. People are rewarded according to merit. 2. People are rewarded according to need. 1. People take primary responsibility for their welfare. 2. People join together to help others. 1. People are proud they belong to the best society there is. 2. People realize that no society is better than any other."
Every choice of a 1 was given a score of 1, and every choice of a 2 was given a score of -1. Those whose total score was close to 14 were extreme conservatives. Those whose total score was close to -14 were extreme liberals.
I assure you I am not making this up. This is what Hibbing et al. regard as real social science.
Wouldn't any reasonable person object that most of these dichotomous choices are ridiculous, because they are false dichotomies? Those who break the rules should always be punished and never forgiven? Or they should always be forgiven and never punished? People should always be rewarded according to merit and never according to need? Or people should always be rewarded according to need and never according to merit? People should always take primary responsibility for their welfare and never help others? Or people should always help others and never take primary responsibility for their own welfare?
If you insist that political ideology consists of a choice between only two alternatives, these are the kind of silly choices that you have to give to people. Remarkably, Sapolsky endorses this nonsense.
Perhaps we need a somewhat wider range of choices. Sapolsky and Hibbing et al. are silent about the proposal by some political scientists--such as William Maddox and Stuart Lilie (in Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum [Cato Institute, 1984])--for using the two dimensions of freedom--economic freedom and personal freedom--to construct a matrix of four or five political ideologies. American public opinion survey data shows, they contend, that American citizens are not just divided into liberals and conservatives, but also into libertarians and populists. Some libertarian theorists (such as David Boaz), as well as the Libertarian Party, have adopted this analysis to construct a matrix of political ideologies based on two dimensions--personal liberty and economic liberty:
You can take a short quiz to see where you belong. If you score high on personal liberty but low on economic liberty, you're a liberal. If you score how on personal liberty but high on economic liberty, you're a conservative. If you score low on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a statist (or an authoritarian). (Maddox and Lilie would call you a populist.) If you score high on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a libertarian. If you score towards the middle on both scales, you're a centrist.
Someone like Bobbio might object that constructing this matrix based on two dimensions of liberty ignores the dimension of equality that separates the egalitarian left and the antiegalitarian right. But the libertarian could respond by arguing that using the two dimensions of liberty does not deny equality if equality is understood as equal liberty rather than equal results. Classical liberals have always understood the natural equality of human beings as the condition of being born "equally free and independent" (in the words of the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776): we are equally free from being ruled over by others without our consent. But this equal liberty will always lead to unequal results, in that there will be some inequality of property, social status, personal achievement, and general success in life. If equality is understood as equal results, then the egalitarian left will have to use governmental coercion to force an equality of outcomes, which is an authoritarian denial of liberty that will also be a denial of equality insofar as authoritarian rulers will have superior power over those they coerce.
Bobbio recognizes this problem in speaking about the egalitarian authoritarianism of the extreme left, but he does not explicitly recognize that even the moderate left is at least partly authoritarian in denying economic liberty. And while Sapolsky tends to identify authoritarianism with the right wing, he does recognize, in at least one passage, the left-wing authoritarianism in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution (468).
And yet even if libertarianism can be defended as a consistent political ideology in its consistent devotion to freedom, we still might wonder whether libertarianism can be understood as rooted in evolved human nature. Haidt's evolutionary moral psychology makes a plausible case for the libertarian principle of liberty as one of six moral foundations shaped in human evolutionary history.
I have written a long series of posts on Haidt. The posts here and here include links to some of the others.
Originally, Haidt argued for five moral foundations in human nature: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Liberals tend to stress the first two. Conservatives tend to stress the last three. But then libertarians complained to Haidt that they had no place in this scheme. Beginning in 2011, Haidt began to survey libertarian attitudes, and he decided that he needed a sixth moral foundation--liberty/oppression--that libertarians tended to stress. (See Ravi Iyer, S. Koleva, J. Graham, P. Ditto, and J. Haidt, "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians," PLoS ONE 7 (2012): e42366.)
Here's a video of Haidt lecturing at the Cato Institute on libertarian moral psychology:
To explain the evolutionary roots of liberty and the resistance to oppression as a moral foundation, Haidt relies on Christopher Boehm's theory of how human ancestors in hunter-gatherer bands used social pressure and punishment to keep bullies and ambitious people from exercising exploitative dominance over society. This is what John Locke saw as the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature: not that human beings were completely equal in every way, because there will always be some high status people who will try to dominate others, but that human beings are naturally inclined to resist being oppressed by those who seek some dominance.
Haidt is best known for his theory of moral disgust--the idea that what originally evolved as a visceral disgust with bad food could evolve into a moral disgust with bad people or bad conduct. Conservatives have a high sensitivity for feeling disgust, and this underlies their principles of loyalty, authority, and sanctity: conservatives are disgusted by people they see as betraying their country, disobeying authority, or desecrating sacred values. Liberals have a low sensitivity for feeling disgust, which allows them to tolerate a lot of conduct that conservatives condemn--homosexuality for example. Sapolsky makes a lot of this (453-55), because like Hibbing et al. he wants to be able to scorn conservatives as people whose moral and political judgments are driven by crude emotional and visceral reactions, as opposed to liberals who are so rational in controlling their emotions and showing tolerance for unconventional behavior and ideas. But in doing this, Sapolsky is silent about Haidt's report that libertarians show the lowest sensitivity to disgust and the highest rationality in their judgments. Libertarians are highly emotional only in showing the emotions of "reactance"--that is, emotions of resistance to those who threaten their individual freedom.
Sapolsky is also silent about how Haidt has shown that most social scientists and psychologists are liberals who display a liberal bias in their research, and therefore Haidt has argued for allowing more conservatives and libertarians to become professors in order to achieve some intellectual balance. I have written about that here.
One of the signs of liberal academic bias is that researchers studying political ideology often show a remarkable ignorance of conservative and libertarian thought. For example, it has long been assumed in this research that all of those people who are not liberals show the "authoritarian personality." This ignores the fact that modern conservatism has been a largely liberal or libertarian conservatism, because it has been a fusion of traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism. So, for example, the illiberal conservatism of Joseph de Maistre has almost no supporters today among modern conservatives. Consequently, most conservatives today think it is important for society to enforce moral and religious virtue in civil society, but they don't think this should be coercively enforced by government.
Even Haidt often misses this in his studies of conservative moral disgust. He will ask conservatives about their disgust for homosexuality, for example, and he then reports that they do indeed feel such disgust. But he doesn't ask them whether they think homosexuality should be a capital crime, as it often was in many legal systems in the past, and continues to be in some legal systems today. If he were to ask this, he would see that conservatives today do not think that such coercive punishment by government should be inflicted on homosexuals. He might even discover that many conservatives are beginning to accept the legalization of homosexual marriage, although they still want the freedom to condemn homosexual marriage in their churches, their families, and their other voluntary associations. This is their way of combining political liberty and social virtue.
But at least Haidt shows a much broader understanding of conservatism and libertarianism than is the case for those like Sapolsky and Hibbing et al. who show a blinding liberal bias. This is manifest in Haidt's moral matrices for liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism. Here are his three figures from The Righteous Mind.
For each moral matrix, the six lines connect the moral thought to the six moral foundations. The thickness of the lines represent the thickness of the commitment to those foundations. So, liberals show their strongest commitment to care/harm, a strong commitment to liberty/oppression and fairness/cheating, and only a very weak commitment to the other three foundations.
Social conservatives show an almost equal commitment to all six moral foundations, which is why Haidt often says that conservatives have a broader matrix than do liberals. Consequently, conservatives are better at understanding liberals than liberals are at understanding conservatives.
The libertarian moral matrix shows a predominant commitment to liberty/oppression, a somewhat strong commitment to fairness/cheating, and much weaker commitments to the other four foundations.
Notice that of the six moral foundations, liberty is the only one that has a strong commitment in all three moral matrices. Is this because liberty provides the common conditions for these moral matrices to coexist in the same society? If so, does that justify the preeminence that libertarians give to liberty as the ground of any good society?
The libertarian moral matrix might seem to be the most narrow of the three. But one should notice that the questions in Haidt's surveys asked about the importance of these six foundations, without asking about the compulsory or voluntary enforcement of these foundations. Libertarians would probably recognize the importance of loyalty, authority, and sanctity as moral principles, as long as they are voluntarily enforced, and thus free from coercion.
Here, again, Haidt misses the libertarian fusion of political liberty and social virtue, which rests on the crucial distinction between state and society.
Sapolsky also misses this when he criticizes conservatives for being "more concerned with 'binding foundations' like loyalty, authority, and sanctity, often stepping-stones to right-wing authoritarianism and social-dominance orientation," and when he praises liberals for having "more refined moral foundations, having jettisoned the less important, more historically damaging ones that conservatives perseverate on" (450). Sapolsky doesn't recognize that what made the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity "historically damaging" was the enforcement of these through coercive violence, and that the libertarian principle of voluntarism allows people to freely commit themselves to the morality of these binding foundations without impeding the equal freedom of others who disagree with them.
Sapolsky's liberal bias is evident in his interview on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah here. Sapolsky is happy to join with Noah in ridiculing conservative Republicans as people whose ideology arises from their disgust reaction to bad smells! He says nothing about libertarians.
