The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Goldstein's Mattering Instinct

 

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

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

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

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

LIFE'S SELF-MATTERING AS RESISTANCE TO ENTROPY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HUMAN FREEDOM AFFIRMS THE MULTIPLICITY OF MATTERING PROJECTS

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

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

HUMAN FREEDOM DENIES THE ZERO-SUM MATTERING PROJECTS

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

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

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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