The Aristotelian and Darwinian Teleology of Ethics and Politics: A Reply to "Darwinian Reactionary"

My argument for Darwinian natural right originated as a response to what Leo Strauss had said in his Introduction to Natural Right and History.  Strauss observed: "natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe.  All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them."  This dependence of natural right on a teleological view of the universe was clearly seen by Aristotle, Strauss explained.  But the "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."

I agreed with Roger Masters that Strauss was wrong to suggest that the question of teleology depended on physics or astronomy, because Aristotle's teleology was primarily biological, and so the question was whether teleology is necessary for explaining living nature, and whether modern Darwinian biology supports such a teleological explanation of organisms.

My answer to this question was that Darwinian biology really does support Aristotelian teleology.  My thinking here was decisively influenced by my reading of Allan Gotthelf's dissertation at Columbia University--"Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality" (1975)--and some of his other writing (see my Darwinian Natural Right, 238-43).  I was persuaded by Gotthelf that Aristotle's final causality is best interpreted as living nature's irreducible potential for form: the development, structure, and functioning of a living organism manifest the actualization of its potential for organic form, an actualization that depends on, but is not reducible to, the natural potentialities of its material elements.  Moreover, far from refuting Aristotle's teleology, modern Darwinian biology provides an evolutionary explanation for living nature's irreducible potential for form.

Understanding the Darwinian teleology of human nature supports a teleological standard for both ethics and politics.  Teleological ethics is based on Aristotle's idea that "the good is the desirable" (Rhetoric 1362a22), that there are at least twenty natural desires of evolved human nature, and that to achieve the harmonious ordering of our often conflicting desires over a whole life, which constitutes human happiness or flourishing, requires good habits of choice and prudence--the moral and intellectual virtues examined in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric, John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.  We can then see that cultivating those virtues is the natural end of a good social order.  We can also see that a classical liberal--or liberal conservative--social order is best in cultivating those virtues.

Teleological politics is rooted in the evolved political psychology of human nature as a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Dominance is the natural propensity of a few politically ambitious individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a regime, with these ambitious few competing for the top position.  Deference is the natural propensity of most individuals to submit to those who are politically dominant.  Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of subordinate individuals to resist exploitative dominance.  We can judge political regimes as better or worse, depending on how well they satisfy these evolved political desires of human nature.  And we can see that a liberal constitutional republic that establishes limited government with a balance of powers under the rule of law is the best political order, because it satisfies the evolved desire of the ruling few to dominate while also satisfying the evolved desire of the subordinate many to be free from exploitative dominance, which secures a balance between governmental authority and individual liberty.  What I am calling the "liberal constitutional republic" corresponds to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call "inclusive institutions" and what Douglas North and his colleagues call the "open access society."

But now the "Darwinian Reactionary" (DR) is criticizing my teleological ethics and politics.  The "Darwinian Reactionary" blog has been running now for almost 13 years.  Recently, DR posted an essay entitled "Darwinian Reactionary vs. Darwinian Conservatism vs. Darwinian Left."  He says that his blog was originally inspired by his reading of Peter Singer's Darwinian Left and my Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism.  He was looking for someone who understood the implications of Darwinian science for ethics and politics.  He saw that Singer was good in showing how a Darwinian understanding of human nature made a socialist utopia impossible, but Singer didn't offer any clear program for what the ethics and politics of a Darwinian Left would look like.  

DR agreed with my attempt to revive an Aristotelian teleological understanding of natural ethical and political norms grounded in Darwinian biology.  But he found that while he agreed with many of my premises, he disagreed with most of my conclusions.  He suggests "that Arnhart is neither sufficiently Aristotelian nor Darwinian."  The main reason for that failure, he asserts, is that "Arnhart is missing the bridge between these two titans," which is "the work of Ruth Millikan, and when you walk across that bridge, I would contend, you end up with my positions."  Here he is referring particularly to Millikan's 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Causes (MIT Press).

He argues for both an ethical theory, which he calls "bioformalism," and a political theory, which he calls "teleoformalism," that he regards as superior to my Darwinian natural right of ethics and politics.

TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS

DR's starting point is Millikan's evolutionary theory of teleological functions.  He explains:

Millikan's Darwinian account of teleology holds an item's proper function is the effect which was replicated because it provided a reproductive benefit.  In the case of living things, we can see that it is the distinctive form of life itself that has been selected for replication because this form of life has proven to be reproductively advantageous.  This is the account of the good that I have called bioformalism.  For humans this is to develop our skills and excellences as children, to attract the best mate possible, to bear and support children, and to work cooperatively with others in order to produce the most advantageous environment in which to live.  The reason Arnhart does not take this path, I would contend, is partially an ignorance of the literature on function, or not fully seeing how it can be applied to Aristotelian teleology, despite spending a lot of time discussing what he calls 'immanent teleology.'  He never cites Millikan despite her being more responsible than anyone for the revival of teleology through a Darwinian lens.

I never cite Millikan because when I read her book, I didn't see that she had added much to what Allan Gotthelf had written about Aristotelian/Darwinian teleology in 1975, 19 years before the publication of her book.  Millikan did not cite Gotthelf in her book, so I assume she was ignorant of his work.  

Most of what DR says about Millikan's theory corresponds to what I have said about "functional causes" and "natural ends" (DNR, 101-105, 238-248).  For example, DR says that part of the teleological good for human beings is "to bear and support children."  I agree.  Because this corresponds to what I say about the natural desire for parental care:

The function of parental care for animals is to protect and nurture offspring that could not survive or grow to maturity without such care.  Throughout the history of the human species, infants have survived and grown only with the help of adults who were willing to feed, protect, and educate them for many years.  If we accept Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which favors those functional adaptations that promoted survival and reproduction in evolutionary history, it would seem likely, therefore, that the desire to care for children is a natural adaptation for human beings (DNR, 103).

But while DR seems to agree with this account of natural desires, he argues that I can't properly explain the distinction between true or normal desires and false or abnormal desires.  To say that the good is the desirable, I have argued, is not to say that the good is whatever we happen to desire at any moment, because we can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable.  DR insists, however, that I need Millikan to explain this.

Millikan's Normal conditions are much better at doing the work that Arnhart wants his poorly defined notion of a true desire to do.  And so when Arnhart says "an animal can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable," we can translate this as "When desires work Normally, they will produce their selected effect; in abNormal conditions (say, when the individual is guided by false beliefs or mental illness), a desire might not benefit the organism the way it has been designed."  For example, perhaps an adolescent male is engaging in risky behavior.  We can postulate that the impulses of adolescent males to engage in risky behavior have been built into us in order, say, to develop one's strength for conflict, or perhaps display fitness to females, or to learn and push one's limits for competitive advantage.  If the individual is badly injured in this behavior, the desire has not produced the effect it was selected for, that is, conditions are abNormal and not gone "according to (nature's) plan.

Well, okay, I can agree with this "translation" of my thought.  But I don't see that this adds anything substantive to what I have said about the "four sources of moral disagreement"--fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires (both normal and abnormal variation in human desires) (DNR, 44-45).

DR also argues that I don't have a good answer to the criticism that my list of twenty natural desires is naive in that it includes the "positive" desires but not the "negative" ones. For example, why not include cruelty and exploitation as natural human desires? The suggestion is that I haven't offered any justification for including only the "nice" desires on my list. Actually, there can be a dark side to most if not all of these natural desires. Obviously, cruelty and exploitation often arise from the natural desires for social ranking and war. And, in fact, many of my critics have criticized me for including war on my list of natural desires. 

But there is a criterion of selection favoring what is truly desirable over what is mistakenly desired that is implicit in the natural desire for friendship.  I understand "friendship" in its broad Aristotelian sense of "social affiliation," which coincides with what David Hume and Adam Smith called "sympathy," and which is the ground for all the moral sentiments and virtues.  In Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides a comprehensive account of the social and political formation of the virtues through "friendship" (philia), which for Aristotle is a general term for all kinds of social bonding in which human beings show some care for one another.  And so, for example, Aristotle identifies "political friendship" as the social glue that binds a people into a political community of mutual care for one another.  

Similarly, Hume and Smith identified "sympathy" as any kind of "fellow feeling" among human beings.  Darwin adopted this idea and made "sympathy" one of the fundamental themes in his evolutionary account of moral and political order.  More recently, biologists and psychologists have used the word "empathy" in a way that largely corresponds to what Hume, Smith, and Darwin would call "sympathy," or what Aristotle would call "friendship."  All agree with Aristotle that the various forms of friendly feeling or social bonding that unite human beings as individuals, as fellow citizens, and as members of the same species are originally rooted in the natural affection of parental care for offspring (NE, 1155a1-33, 1159a27-37, 1160b23-62a29).  "In the household, are first found the origins and springs of friendship, of polity, and of justice" (Eudemian Ethics, 1242b1-2).

In explaining a man's desire to be worthy of praise and not blame, Smith observed, "Nature, accordingly, has endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men" (TMS, 117).  When we praise others, we do so because we think they are truly virtuous, not because of their deceptive appearance of virtue that hides the reality of vice.  If we think they have deceived us into thinking they are more virtuous than they really are, then we blame them.  Therefore our rules of morality dictate that we praise what is truly praiseworthy and blame what is truly blameworthy.  We then feel guilty if we violate these rules ourselves, which is conscience.  A man who feels guilty, Smith explained, "anticipates the contempt and derision from which nothing saves him but the ignorance of those he lives with.  He still feels that he is the natural object of these sentiments, and still trembles at the thought of what he would suffer, if they were ever actually exerted against him" (TMS, 118).

Smith observed that our natural desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments--which I call our natural desire for friendship--makes it painful for us to even imagine that others would not share our sentiments.  We judge ourselves by how we appear to an imaginary impartial spectator who is not deceived by mere appearances, so that we care not only for our real reputation, but even for our imaginary reputation.  Of course, it is easier for us to do what is praiseworthy when we are actually praised for our good conduct, and that's why only a few individuals are high-minded enough to always do what is truly praiseworthy, even when they are not actually praised, or even when they are unfairly condemned.

Although Darwin never used Smith's phrase impartial spectator, Darwin's account of morality as arising from social instincts of sympathy and reason conforms to Smith's impartial spectator procedure (Descent of Man, 136-148).  And as it was for Smith, Darwin saw this procedure as motivating our concern for both our real and our imagined reputations.  He observed: "Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us--of their imagined approbation or disapprobation; and this all follows from sympathy, a fundamental element of the social instincts.  A man who possessed no trace of such instincts would be an unnatural monster" (Descent, 136).  Darwin recognized that Smithian sympathy is variable across individuals, and some few individuals, perhaps pure psychopaths, might show little or no concern for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, which would make such a person "an unnatural monster."  Similarly, Smith suggested that those who could commit dreadful crimes without feeling any pangs of remorse would have to fall into "the vilest and most abject of all states, a complete insensibility to honor and infamy, to vice and virtue" (TMS, 118).

What Smith and Darwin described as the emergence of moral sentiments from the mutual sympathy of sentiments is what evolutionary theorists today would call "reciprocal altruism."  We cooperate with those who are not genetically related to us if there is some reciprocal exchange.  I will cooperate with you if you have been cooperative with me (direct reciprocity), or if I know you have a reputation for being cooperative with others (indirect reciprocity).  It's tit for tat.  People are rewarded for their good reputation as trustworthy cooperators and punished for their bad reputations as untrustworthy cheaters.  And the most reliably trustworthy people are those who live under the all-seeing eyes of the imaginary impartial spectator.

But DR thinks this is all wrong.

Human history is filled with limitless examples of evil that did receive the approbation of others; the evils done by Nazis did receive approval from other Nazis.  As an additional example, I recall reading an account of Native Americans who had captured a young girl from another tribe.  At first they seemed to welcome her into the tribe and treated her kindly, until one day they tied her to a tree, and the entire tribe took turns firing arrows into her until she was a bloody pulp.  That's human nature for you.  The tribesmen in my example were not a band of psychopaths, they were not mentally defective, they were not irrational, or subhuman and lacking in some innate moral sense possessed by other humans. . . . Harming one's enemies is ubiquitous occurrence in human nature and history. . . .

DR notes that in my blog posts on human rights, I have quoted Darwin about how human beings can extend their sympathy to embrace all of humanity:

Darwin saw a history of moral progress in which human sympathy has been gradually extended from the family to small tribes, then to large nations, and eventually to all of humanity. In the Descent of Man, he wrote: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." 

DR objects:

I have to disagree with Darwin here, the barrier is not artificial.  Evolution would demand that sympathies extend to those who are actually cooperators, and distrust and animosity extend to those who are actually competitors and threats to our well-being.  It would not entail that we extend sympathy to competitors.

DR quotes me as saying that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "shows how moral outrage against atrocities expresses a universal morality," and that "we judge that as a rule human beings have a right to life because the killing of innocent people would elicit moral emotions of disapproval from any normal human being."

But DR objects: "human history is absolutely swimming in cases where the killing of innocent people was celebrated on a mass scale.  If the good is just what other people approve of, then Nazis or the tribesmen in my example are good."

DR is mistaken when he says "the evils done by Nazis did receive approval from other Nazis."  As far as I know there is no evidence that the Nazis approved the evils of Nazism.  There is, however, plenty of evidence that the Nazis approved of Nazism because they believed (mistakenly) that it was good--perhaps even a transcendent good.  That's why some historians of Nazism have written books about "Hitler's Ethic" and "The Nazi Conscience."

Richard Weikart argues that Hitler illustrates how the greatest evils are often perpetrated under the appearance of doing good--especially, if the apparent good is a utopian vision that seems to justify any means to the utopian end. I agree with this, because I am persuaded of the Aristotelian principle that people tend to act for the good, or at least for what appears good to them. It is unlikely that any influential moral or political movement can prevail if it does not appeal to some moral sense that a great good is being achieved. The problem, however, is that human beings are often mistaken in their moral beliefs, particularly when they are seduced by some utopian conception of radical transformation that requires evil means to apparently good ends.

According to Weikart, the fundamental end for Hitler's ethic was the evolutionary improvement in the human species. Hitler interpreted the Darwinian conception of evolution as dominated by a struggle for existence as teaching that the only moral imperative was the survival and reproduction of the superior races over the inferior races. The Aryan or Nordic race prevalent in the German Volk arose in evolutionary history as the superior race. Promoting the progressive expansion of that race would therefore promote the biological improvement of the human species.

As I have indicated in previous posts, many of the Nazi philosophers were neo-Kantians who believed in "eternal values" and in Nazism as fulfilling that eternal moral order. Moreover, Claudia Koonz's book The Nazi Conscience (2003) shows how the Nazi regime was organized around a strict communitarian morality of sacrificing selfish interests for the good of the community. Also, Jonathan Glover's moral history of the 20th century shows how the greatest atrocities were committed by those moved by a fanatical utopian belief in the goodness of their cause.

That the Nazis had a moral sense was clear in the Nuremberg Trials as portrayed in the recent movie Nuremberg. On the morning of November 20, 1945, the tribunal convened to begin its public trial.  "Goering entered first," El-Hai writes.  "He wore his pearl-gray, brass-buttoned Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia and symbols of rank, and he appeared energized to retake the world stage" (128).  Goering had had months to plan his defense, and he expected to speak eloquently of the glories of the Nazi German Reich.

But then, on the afternoon of November 29, Goering's plans for his defense were undercut when the prosecution showed filmed footage of the concentration camps shot by British and American troops less than a year earlier.  Everyone was transfixed by the images of emaciated camp inmates, stacks of corpses, and bulldozers pushing mounds of bodies into mass graves.  At least ten minutes of the movie were given over to these films.  And even though most of us in the theatre had seen some of these images previously, to see them again was as disturbing as it was for the courtroom audience in the movie.  Even Goering coughed nervously and leaned on the railing of the dock and covered his face with his right arm.

Later, Goering said to Douglas Kelley: "It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everybody was laughing with me.  And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything" (El-Hai, 136).  It "spoiled everything" because there was no way for the Nazis to evade the moral disgust that it elicited. 

Now, while it is true, as DR says, that "harming one's enemies is a ubiquitous occurrence in human nature and history," if "one's enemies" must be people "who are actually competitors and threats to our well-being," there was no plausible argument that the Jews in the concentration camps were "threats to the well-being" of the Nazis.  Those Jews were clearly innocent people, and the Nazis could not say that killing innocent people was good.

And as to DR's story about the Native Americans torturing and killing the young girl from another tribe, I would need to know more about the circumstances and motives in this case.  Would those Native Americans have said oh we just enjoy killing innocent young women for fun?  Or would they have said we discovered that she was a threat to us, and so we killed her in self-defense?

That we condemn the perpetrators of great evil--like the Nazis--and want to punish them testifies to the natural moral sense as part of our evolved human nature.  One sign that that moral sense is an evolved instinct of the human mind is that it appears early in human development: even babies have a sense of justice.

The one-year-old decided to take justice into his own hands.  He had just watched a puppet show with three characters.  The puppet in the middle rolled a ball to the puppet on the right, who passed it right back to him. It then rolled the ball to the puppet on the left, who ran away with it.  At the end of the show, the 'nice' puppet and the 'naughty' puppet were brought down from the stage and set before the boy.  A treat was placed in front of each of them, and the boy was invited to take one of the treats away.  As predicted, and like most toddlers in this experiment, he took it from the 'naughty' one--the one who had run away with the ball.  But this wasn't enough.  The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head.

In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Paul Bloom reports this as one of the experiments conducted at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University (p. 7).  He presents these experiments as showing that Charles Darwin was right in claiming that evolved human nature shows a natural moral sense--a sense of right and wrong--that is manifest in babies in the first few years of life, appearing at such an early age that it must be a natural instinct that requires little or no social learning.  (Bloom summarized some of his reasoning in an article in the New York Times Magazine here.)

Bloom also argues that these experiments confirm Adam Smith's moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because they show that Smith was right in observing that we are naturally social animals, with evolved propensities to care about our fellow human beings, a care that is expressed as sympathy or empathy, through which we judge others and judge ourselves as we appear in the eyes of others, judgments that are expressed as moral sentiments of approbation or disapprobation.  When we see people suffering unfair injuries, we sympathize with their suffering and share their resentment against those who have injured them, because we have imaginatively projected ourselves into their situations--perhaps even projecting ourselves into a puppet show.  That resentment against injustice is the natural ground of rights, because we judge rights from wrongs: human beings have the right not to be injured in ways that would elicit our moral resentment.  This is what I have called Smith's reflective liberal sentimentalism (here, here, and here).

Consider how Bloom's experiments with babies illustrate these points.  The toddler who recognized the naughty puppet and decided that he deserved punishment showed a combination of reason and emotion.  He had the cognitive capacity to understand that the puppet in the middle had been harmed by the puppet on the left who ran away with the ball.  He also had to sympathize with the imagined resentment of the puppet victim, which motivated his punishment of the bad puppet by taking away the treat and slapping him.  Notice that this third-party punishment is a disinterested or impartial judgment, in the sense that it concerns actions that don't directly affect the baby himself.

The cognitive understanding of the puppet show by itself would not have motivated the moral judgment without the moral emotion of sympathetic resentment.  Psychopaths illustrate this.  Bloom relates the story of a thirteen-year-old mugger who viciously attacked elderly women.  When a reporter asked him about the pain he had caused a woman, the boy was surprised by the question and responded: "What do I care? I'm not her."  He had a rational understanding of what he had done, but his moral judgment was impaired by his lack of moral emotions such as sympathy and guilt.

If these babies show a naturally evolved propensity to third-party punishment, then we need to explain the evolutionary process that produced it.  There are at least three theories for this.  We might explain this through group selection, in that groups with third-party punishment tended to outcompete groups without such punishment.  Or we might explain this through individual selection, in that individuals inclined to third-party punishment earned good reputations that enhanced their survival and reproduction.  Or we might explain this though an evolutionary combination of revenge and empathy, in that individuals imagine themselves in the shoes of a victim and then respond as if they themselves had been harmed.

But presumably DR would say that history shows that there is no natural sense of justice because "human history is filled with limitless examples of evil that did receive the approbation of others."

My next post will be on DR's "political theory of teleoformalism."

E. O. Wilson and The Darwinian Nationalist Conservatism of Nicholas Wade

WILSON'S SOCIOBIOLOGY

                                                     Edward Wilson in 2003 (Died in 2021)

On May 28, 1975, the front page of the New York Times featured a long article by Boyce Rensberger entitled "Sociobiology: Updating Darwin on Behavior."  It was about Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: A New Synthesis.  Although the book was not to be published by Harvard University Press until the end of June, Rensberger reported that scientists who had heard about the book or who had seen advance copies of it were excited by this new field of study--sociobiology as the study of the biological basis for social behavior in all species, including human beings.  Most exciting was "the revolutionary implication that much of man's behavior toward his fellows, ranging from aggressive impulses to humanitarian inspirations, may be as much a product of evolution as the structure of the hand or the size of the brain."

Over the summer and fall of 1975, the reviews of the book, in newspapers, popular magazines, and science journals, were almost uniformly laudatory.  For example, the reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, proclaimed: "Actually the book may be regarded as an evolutionary event in itself, announcing for all who can hear that we are on the verge of breakthroughs in the effort to understand our place in the scheme of things" (John Pfeiffer, "Sociobiology," July 27, 1975, p. 4).

But then, in November, The New York Review of Books published a passionate denunciation of Wilson's book signed by 15 members of the "Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People," who were mostly academics in the area of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Some of them were academic colleagues of Wilson at Harvard--such as Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Stephen Gould, and Ruth Hubbard.  They attacked Wilson for being a genetic determinist who provided "a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex."  They accused him of reviving the genetically deterministic theories of eugenics and genetic racism that had "provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany" (Elizabeth Allen et al., "Against 'Sociobiology,' November 13, 1975, pp. 182, 184-86).

A few months later, 35 members of the Sociobiology Study Group elaborated their critique of Wilson in the journal Bioscience.  Again, they criticized him for advancing a biological determinism that would justify existing human societies like the United States as rooted in "human nature."  They saw this as manifesting a "deeply conservative politics" that denied the possibility of "social change."  

Determinists assert that the possibility of change in social institutions is limited by the biological constraints on individuals.  But we know of no relevant constraints placed on social processes by human biology.  There is no evidence from ethnography, archaeology, or history that would enable us to circumscribe the limits of possible human social organization.  What history and ethnography do provide us with are the materials for building a theory that will itself be an instrument of social change (E. Allen et al, "Sociobiology--Another Biological Determinism," BioScience no. 3 [March 1976]).

Although they did not identify what kind of "social change" they wanted, most of the members of the Sociobiology Study Group could be identified as ultra-leftists.  Some of them--like Richard Lewontin--identified themselves as "Marxist biologists" who shared "a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just--a socialist--society" (R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature [New York: Pantheon Books, 1984], p. ix.).  This would explain why they wanted "no relevant constraints placed on social processes by human biology" that might hinder the achievement of a socialist society.

Wilson responded to these critics with two arguments.  He denied that he was a genetic determinist.  And he denied that his sociobiology supported a reactionary politics of oppression.

To say that "human nature is to some extent genetically influenced" is not genetic determinism, he argued.  While denying that human nature is "infinitely malleable," he also denied that it is "completely fixed."  Because "the truth appears to lie somewhere in between, closer to the environmentalist than to the genetic pole."  Consequently, one of the pervasive themes of Wilson's sociobiology became the need to understand the coevolution of genes and culture.

On the question of the significance of human sociobiology for political thought, Wilson warned the Science for the People group that their insistence that cultural determinism was unconstrained by human nature would remove all barriers to oppressive rule by the most powerful people in a culture.  Wilson even quoted leftist Noam Chomsky as making this point: "If people are, in fact, malleable and plastic beings with no essential psychological nature, then why should they not be controlled and coerced by those who claim authority, special knowledge, and a unique insight into what is best for those less enlightened?"

Wilson's solution to this problem was to claim that human resistance to oppression can be grounded in those human rights that are rooted in human nature.

To the extent that the biological interpretation noted here proves correct, men have rights that are innate, rooted in the ineradicable drives for survival and self-esteem, and these rights do not require the validation of ad hoc theoretical constructions produced by society.  If culture is all that created human rights, as the extreme environmentalist position holds, then culture can equally well validate their removal (Wilson, "Academic Vigilantism and the Political Significance of Sociobiology," Bioscience 26 [March 1976]: 183, 187-190).

But then what is it about evolved human nature that supports these natural rights?  In Sociobiology, Wilson pointed to the "emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain," which generate the moral emotions such as anger, indignation, guilt, shame, gratitude, sympathy, and love that enforce our human sense of rights and duties (pp. 3, 120-21, 129, 547-75).  Some years later, in his book Consilience: The Unity of Science (New York: Norton, 1998), Wilson saw his evolutionary explanation of morality as a revival of the idea of moral sentiments as developed by David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and Edward Westermarck (pp. 172-80, 238-40, 248-56).

I have argued that we should see Darwin, Westermarck, and Wilson as the three evolutionary waves of Adam Smith’s liberal moral theory, because each of them initiated a new turn in the evolutionary moral psychology that has confirmed and deepened Smith’s liberal theory of the moral sentiments.  I have identified this as a liberal moral theory for three reasons.  It assumes a liberal individualism that recognizes the natural separateness of individuals and the moral claims that individuals make.  It asserts the liberal no-harm principle of justice as a “negative virtue” that justifies punishing individuals for any unprovoked harming of others through force or fraud.  And it employs the liberal idea of society as a largely self-regulating and spontaneous order arising from the social interaction of individuals seeking to satisfy their individual desires.

WADE'S DARWINIAN NATIONALIST CONSERVATISM

                                                                         Nicholas Wade

The first prominent published defense of Wilson's sociobiology against the Sociobiology Study Group was by Nicholas Wade writing in the journal Science, where he was a staff writer and editor.  He accused the members of the Study Group of distorting Wilson's book, particularly on the question of genetic determinism.  Far from being a genetic determinist, Wade observed, Wilson had sad that "the genes have given away most of their sovereignty," and that perhaps no more than 10 percent of social behavior has a genetic basis.

Wade also charged the Study Group with engaging in personal attacks and inflammatory political rhetoric--such as associating sociobiology with Nazism--that might scare people away from investigating this new field of human sociobiology (Wade, "Sociobiology: Troubled Birth for New Discipline," Science 191 [March 19, 1976]: 1151-1155). 

And yet Wade himself was not deterred from such studies, because he has written a series of books on the evolution of human nature as the foundation of human social life.

In 2014, his book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, provoked a fierce controversy over his claims about the influence of racial differences in recent human history.  This debate was almost as fierce as the earlier debate over Wilson's Sociobiology, or the debate in 1994 over Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press).  I have written about these debates over Wade's Troublesome Inheritance and Herrnstein and Murray's book.  The emotional intensity of these controversies is due to the fact that these books challenge a fundamental assumption of the modern social sciences--that human social behavior, in both its uniformity and diversity, is largely if not entirely shaped by culture rather than biology.

Wade stated his main idea in one sentence that he repeated many times: "human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional" (4).  More fully stated, he argued:

that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races [sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, East Asians, Australian and New Guinean aborigines, and American Indians] and others [including ethnic groups such as the Ashkenazi Jews]; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations (242).

As you can imagine, this provoked vehement scorn, particularly among academic intellectuals, because it seemed to promote biological racism, although Wade denied this.

Now, in a new book--The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations (New York: Harper, 2025)--Wade renews his argument for the evolution of human nature as shaping social and political life, but he says almost nothing about race (although he does say a lot about ethnicity)--perhaps to avoid the nasty attacks that he stirred up in 2014.  The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the word "ethnicity" was hardly ever used from 1770 to 1950.  But then it became much more frequent after 1950.  This was probably because "ethnicity" could replace the word "race," which had become a distasteful word because of Nazi race theory.

Like Wilson, Wade in his new book continues to challenge "the ideology of the ultra-left" and particularly "the ultra-left's prohibition on applying Darwin's theory to people" (p. 215).  His reader might infer from this that he is defending conservative or right-wing politics, just as Wilson's left-wing critics thought he was promoting a "deeply conservative politics."  

Wade denies that this is the case.  But his denial is ambiguous and evasive.  Consider this one long passage:

The survival behaviors that evolution has built into the human genome--sex differences, family formation, pro-natalism, the religious instinct, tribalism/nationalism--sound very much like conservative values.  Does this mean that evolution is somehow a validation of conservative politics?  Not really.

Evolution conserves survival behaviors that have worked in the past.  It's a process that can only look backward, not forward.  Conservatism also values behaviors and traditions that have worked in the past.  The two systems inevitably overlap.  Moreover, many conservative values, such as love of family and country, are universal and shared by liberals as well.  It's just that conservatives place a greater emphasis on these traditional principles.

But human societies cannot stay the same.  Not only must they adapt to the impositions of a changing environment, but they are also in fervent competition with one another.  Politics has to promote and govern change as well as the conservation of values and traditions.  The evolutionary perspective provides no basis for favoring conservative over liberal politics.  It establishes only that certain values, widely held even if more firmly emphasized by conservatives, are the pillars that support the structure of human societies (p. 211).

Wade's readers should read that over a second time.  They might then ask themselves, if "the pillars that support the structure of human societies"--the pillars "built into the human genome" by evolution--are "more firmly emphasized by conservatives," doesn't that mean "that evolution is somehow a validation of conservative politics"? 

Moreover, if his readers notice how heavily Wade relies on the arguments of Yoram Hazony--particularly, in his book The Virtue of Nationalism--who is the leading theoretician of "national conservatism," they will have to infer, as I do, that Wade is promoting a Darwinian nationalist conservatism (pp. 161, 172, 210, 226).

Since Hazony rejects any rooting of nationalism in "Darwinian science" (Virtue, p. 69), Wade's Darwinian argument for nationalist conservatism departs from Wade's argument in that respect.

Now since I have written a book entitled Darwinian Conservatism, and since that's also the title of this blog, you might think that I would be in total agreement with Wade.  I do agree with most of what he says.  But I can't agree with him on every point.

My Darwinian conservatism is a Darwinian liberal conservatism.  Or, as I sometimes say, a Darwinian Lockean liberalism or classical liberalism.

Consequently, I disagree with Wade's Darwinian nationalistic conservatism on some important points.  For example, while Wade argues that the social cohesion of a nation requires ethnic homogeneity or at least a dominant ethnicity, I believe that a free society can allow for a multiethnic nation.  And while Wade believes that social cohesion requires highly restrictive immigration to favor the native culture of the nation, I believe that a free society benefits from largely open borders that allows immigrants to "vote with their feet" for freedom.

Also, I don't worry as much as Wade does about declining fertility rates leading to the extinction of the human species.   I see this as an evolutionary reproductive strategy in which parents in the richer and more developed nations can decide to invest more resources in fewer children so that those children are more likely to be successful adults because of the value of their "human capital."  

Moreover, the explosive growth of the human population over the past 200 years from 900 million to 8.3 billion doesn't suggest that human extinction is coming anytime soon.  And as long as countries like the United States with low fertility rates are open to immigration, they will continue to have growing populations.  The U.S. population has grown every year for over 100 years, primarily because of immigration.  Of course, Trump's anti-immigration policies could slow or even reverse that growth.

I will elaborate these points in my next post.

How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.

On the Question of Religion and Ethics, Adam Smith Was the Last Esoteric Writer

Daniel Klein has written an essay on "Adam and God" published at the website for the American Institute for Economic Research.  He notes that the scholarly interpreters of Adam Smith have disagreed about whether God, or a being like God, is crucial for Smith's ethics.  He argues that "yes, a God-like being plays a central role in Smith's ethics."  In making that argument, he believes that he is in agreement with a long list of Smith scholars, and I am on that list.

Whether I agree with Klein depends on resolving the ambiguity in his claim that "a God-like being plays a central role in Smith's ethics."  This is ambiguous in two ways.  First, does the "God-like being" exist independently of the human mind, or does it exist only as an anthropomorphic projection of the human mind?  Second, must this religious belief "play a central role" in the ethics of all human beings, or is this religious belief necessary for the ethics of some human beings, but not all?

If Klein means to say that God as an anthropomorphic projection of the human mind plays a central role for some but not all human beings in Smith's ethics, then I agree.  If some Smith scholars do not see this as Smith's teaching, it's because they fail to recognize that Smith was the last esoteric writer, and so they fail to distinguish Smith's surface teaching from his secret teaching.

Like David Hume in his Natural History of Religion, Smith explains religious belief as a natural psychological propensity for anthropomorphic projection of human mental experience onto the universe, so that human beings imagine that there are invisible spirits with minds like their own (see, for example, TMS, 163-64).  And since human beings have moral sentiments and passions, they imagine that these divine beings have the same moral sentiments and passions.  In this way, religion sanctions morality as divine law, and thus provides supernatural support for a natural sense of moral duty.  A philosopher like Smith might then conclude that moral rules are "justly regarded" as divine laws.  Even if he thinks this is only a noble lie, he thinks that it is good for us if most of us believe it to be true.

Klein rightly points to a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (p. 215) where Smith speaks of the "man within the breast" as the "representative of the impartial spectator," and the impartial spectator is understood to be a single universal being, which, according to Klein but be a superhuman or God-like being.

But the thought in this passage is elaborated in another passage, where Smith says that human beings must consult "this inmate of the breast, this abstract man, the representative of mankind, and substitute of the Deity, whom nature has constituted the supreme judge of all their actions" (130).  Notice here the equivalence between "the representative of mankind" and the "substitute of the Deity," and the suggestion that it is natural for human beings to imagine the Deity as the anthropomorphic projection of mankind.

In some previous posts, I have shown how Darwin and modern evolutionary psychologists have confirmed this insight of Smith and Hume that believing in God is a natural, almost inevitable, consequence of the innate propensities of the human mind as shaped by natural selection in evolutionary history. 

Smith is also like his friend Hume in thinking that some human beings can be good without God--they can recognize moral law as enforced by natural human sanctions without having to believe this is a divine law enforced by supernatural divine sanctions.  This supports Smith's liberal moral anthropology that does not depend on a transcendent moral theology.

The best evidence for this is in Smith's letter on the life and death of Hume--the Letter to William Strahan of November 9, 1776--in which he publicly and explicitly endorsed Hume's skepticism by praising him as a wise and virtuous man, indicating that religious belief was not indispensable for morality, and suggesting that he no longer saw the necessity for esoteric writing, because he lived in a society that was liberal enough to tolerate freedom of thought and speech for philosophers like Hume and himself.  He thus became the last esoteric writer and signaled the success of the liberal Enlightenment in making esoteric writing unnecessary and undesirable. 

Prior to this letter in 1776, Smith was an esoteric writer.  But after this letter, he became more open in his writings, saying things publicly that shocked religious believers, but without suffering violent persecution.

All of these points have been elaborated in previous posts.

The Decline of Monarchy and the Evolutionary Symbolic Niche Construction of Bourgeois Culture

Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace After Her Coronation in Westminster Cathedral in 1953

THE DECLINE OF MONARCHY

On pages 16-17 of the paper by Gerring et al., you can see graphs for "Monarchies and Republics in Europe, 1100-2005" and "Monarchies and Republics in the World, 1700-2005."  Here "republic" means simply "nonmonarchy."  The primary alternatives to monarchy were "personal dictatorships" and "corporate forms of government" (with public assemblies that were either democratic or oligarchic).  What is striking in both graphs is how for most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeds the number of nonmonarchies; but then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpasses the number of monarchies.  Why?

If King Charles III of Great Britain were to declare that he was going to reclaim all of the monarchic power once held by Charles I and Charles II in the seventeenth century, this would undoubtedly be rejected, and even ridiculed, by the British Parliament and the British people.  Why?

Here's the answer from Gerring et al.: "We have argued that monarchy solved the primordial coordination problem of politics in the premodern era.  Where societies are disconnected, a focal point is needed and monarchy was, for millennia, a readily available heuristic for establishing legitimate government.  In the modern era, as societies became more interconnected, monarchy's advantage disappeared.  With societies now highly mobilized and interconnected, monarchy's inability to integrate the masses into politics became a defect rather than an asset" (17).  According to Gerring et al., the primary reason why societies today are so "highly mobilized and interconnected" is the development of mass communications--the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet.  In particular, they show how the diffusion of radios beginning in the 1920s is associated with the decline of monarchy in the modern era (23-26).

But this raises some obvious questions that are not answered by Gerring and his colleagues.  What explains the development of mass communications?  And what was it about the content of mass communications that subverted monarchy?

Does it make any sense to say that "monarchy's inability to integrate the masses into politics became a defect rather than an asset"?  Why can't monarchy use modern mass communication to glorify monarchy among the masses?

Modern mass communication is a product of modern science and technology.  What is it about modern culture that has promoted science and technology?

Monarchy depends on a perception of society as a hierarchy.  Patricia Crone observes: "Pre-industrial society was commonly envisaged as a hierarchy (chain of command) in which everyone knew his proper place, enjoyed the appropriate rights and duties and obeyed his superiors, receiving obedience from his inferiors in his turn: all in the last resort obeyed the monarch, through whom human society was slotted in with the divine" (115).  This hierarchy was a very narrow pyramid--with a ruling elite at the top that was about 1-2% of the population and peasants at the bottom who were about 80-90% of the population.  What is it about modern culture that has undermined this premodern perception of society as a rigid hierarchy?

One possible answer to all of these questions is suggested by Crone's book, although Crone does not explicitly state it: modernity has dissolved the monarchic culture of hierarchy by promoting the evolutionary symbolic niche construction of the bourgeois culture of equal liberty.

THE EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC CULTURE

According to Crone, human beings are unique in their capacity and need for culture: "Human beings are distinguished from other animals by their inability to survive without culture, that is information which is not transmitted genetically and which thus has to be learnt afresh by every new generation.  (For example, the capacity to reproduce is genetically transmitted, but kinship systems, courtship etiquette and marriage rules are elements of culture; the capacity to utter noises is genetically transmitted, but languages have to be learnt; so do social and political institutions, agriculture, pottery-making, counting, writing and so on.)" (94).

The social organization of other animals is built into their genes, and thus every species of social animal has its own genetically determined social structure that does not change.  "The human animal is of course genetically programmed too.  However, its programme for social organization is deficient (and to some extent even counter-productive).  The programme does little but instruct its bearer to learn, or in other words to acquire culture with which to supplement (and in some cases even to suppress) such specific instructions as it retains.  Without doing so, the species simply could not survive; doing so, it can survive almost anywhere on earth and even, for limited periods, outside it.  Culture is thus the species-specific environment of Homo sapiens.  Living in accordance with nature is an attractive idea, but in the human case it actually means living with culture" (94-95).

Crone explains human culture as a construct of the human mind that can be imagined but not directly observed.  Through cultural constructions, human beings create world views--that is, theoretical constructions of the world in the mind.  World views can be prescriptive, in that they provide a valuation of the world--telling us what to do and not do.  These prescriptive world views can be religious, ideological, philosophical, or moral.  Religious world views differ from the others in that religion explains the world with reference to supernatural beings rather than abstract principles or impersonal laws.  Religions have been more popular in history than the other atheist or non-theist world views, because "supernatural beings endowed with human feelings are easier to understand, love and obey than abstract concepts."  

In contrast to these prescriptive world views, Crone argues, modern science provides a purely descriptive world view--a theoretical construction of the world that explains the world without telling us what to do (142-43).  She does not answer the obvious objection to this claim--that modern science must be prescriptive (in other words, ethical) because the practical commitment to the life of science implies that this is a good life.  The success of modern science and its promotion of modern mass communications would have been impossible without the modern ethical commitment to science as a human good.

Crone identifies two functions of culture that are best served by religious world views: the drawing of socio-political maps and providing meaning.  The first is important because since human beings are not genetically programmed for any specific kind of socio-political order, they need to culturally construct a conception of good social and political order as an invention of the human imagination.  Crone offers a simple, and comical, illustration:

"Nothing in my genetic equipment tells me that I should milk cows or be forbidden to do so; you may force me to milk them, but if that is all there is to it, I may beat you up or run away the moment you are busy drinking; and though you may be in league with others today, you may fall out with them tomorrow: common interests are highly unstable, as anyone familiar with the phenomenon of intrigue should know.  By contrast, if you devise a religion which says that the gods want my kind to milk and your kind to stick together in enjoyment of authority, on the grounds that my kind descend from a cow whereas you and yours descend from a god, then you may hope to create a society which remains stable not only during our lifetime, but also, and crucially, when social roles have to be transferred to the next generation: the religion would both justify and solidify the social order" (147).

The second function of culture--providing meaning--is served when a religious world view justifies the socio-political order by showing how it fits into God's plan for the world and for the human beings who obey His laws.  As Crone indicates, religion justified monarchy in pre-industrial societies by identifying the king as the link between the divine and the human worlds.  This justified the premodern hierarchical ranking from high to low: from God to King to peasants.

The Crown, Orb, and Sceptre of the Monarch on Queen Elizabeth's Coffin

At the funeral for Queen Elizabeth II, we saw the symbols of this link to the divine in the monarchy.  These are the same symbols displayed at Elizabeth's coronation in 1953.  The Sceptre and Orb were first created for Charles II's coronation in 1661, which was the restoration of the monarchy that had been overthrown in 1649 with the beheading of Charles I and later the establishment of a Republic.  The Sceptre represents the Crown's power and governance.  The Orb is a golden jeweled globe with a gem-encrusted cross symbolizing that the monarch's power is from God.  At the coronation of King Charles II next year, we will see him receiving this same Crown, Orb, and Sceptre from the Archbishop of Canterbury.  For Elizabeth's coronation in 1953, William Walton composed a march for orchestra entitled "Orb and Sceptre."

But now these seventeenth-century symbols of the divine right of monarchs have been reduced to a purely ceremonial role in a modern society that no longer believes that monarchs rule by divine right.  Most of us certainly don't believe that there is any divinely ordained monarchic hierarchy in which most human beings must live as peasants under the dominance of a tiny ruling elite.  We believe that all human beings are created equal and endowed by their Creator with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are established by consent of the governed to secure those individual rights.  In other words, most of us believe in a social and political order of liberal democracy justified by a culture of bourgeois virtues, in which most human beings belong to a bourgeois middle class, and all human beings are regarded in principle as equally free.

Crone correctly sees the importance of the rise of bourgeois culture in explaining the transition from pre-industrial societies to modern industrial societies.  Pre-industrial societies were based on the fundamental idea that there is a natural, cosmic, or divine hierarchy by which one monarch and few members of a small elite group are born with the authority to rule over the great mass of human beings, mostly peasants, who must submit to being pushed around and exploited without complaint.  Bourgeois ethics denies that idea by asserting that all human beings are naturally equal in their liberty, and that they cannot rightly be ruled by anyone else without their consent. Crone is mistaken in thinking that this bourgeois culture--like all culture--transcends our evolved human nature as social and political animals, and thus cannot be explained by evolutionary biological science.

As I have argued in previous posts, human beings are not the only cultural animals, but they probably are the only animals with symbolic culture, who use language to create social institutions through symbolic niche construction.  Human beings do this through a Lockean social contract by which people consent to establish institutions by agreeing to constitute those institutions.  We do this through what John Searle calls a Declaration of Status Functions: Let X count as Y in the context of C.  

Let this twenty-dollar bill count as money in the U.S. currency system.  Or let Joe Biden count as president of the United States because he was elected through the electoral system established by the Constitution.  

Or let Prince Charles count as King Charles III because he is the oldest son of the dead queen?  But today the British understanding of the legitimacy of the monarchy differs from that which prevailed during the monarchy of Charles I and Charles II.  The British people no longer agree to see the monarch as the ruling sovereign by divine right at the top of a hierarchy with most people as obedient peasants at the bottom.  Now the British people agree that Parliament is supreme and that the Prime Minister will act as the chief executive, so that the monarch will be the ceremonial head of state but not the ruling sovereign.  And the British people see themselves not as obedient peasants but as human beings who are in principle naturally free and equal, who obey only that government to which they have consented.

THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES?

What we see here is what Patricia Crone and other historians call the "rise of the bourgeoisie"--the symbolic niche construction of bourgeois liberty and equality that constitutes the liberal culture of the modern world, as set against the illiberal culture of the pre-modern world (see Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, 21-24, 186-87, 195-97, 206).

This all began in the 18th century with Adam Smith's liberal idea--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 664, 687).  In previous posts, I have identified this as what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "Bourgeois Revaluation," which can be expressed as a Searlean status function: Let the bourgeois life count as honorable in a commercial society.  As McCloskey says, this bourgeois liberalism can be understood as "reinstating a pre-agricultural equality" by establishing an equal dignity and liberty for ordinary people--including an "equality of genuine comfort"--that restores the equal autonomy of individuals enjoyed in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years until the establishment of rigid class hierarchies in agrarian state societies (Bourgeois Equality, 631-39).  This is a restatement of John Locke's argument for liberalism as the restoration of the natural liberty and equality of the state of nature.

McCloskey overstates her case, however, when she argues that the bourgeois virtues include all of the traditional seven virtues--four pagan virtues (prudence, temperance, courage, and justice) and three Christian virtues (faith, hope, and charity).  In Bourgeois Equality (xxi, 423) and Bourgeois Virtue (508), she says that the bourgeois virtues are "the seven virtues exercised in a commercial society," and "the seven principal virtues of pagan and Christian Europe were recycled as bourgeois."  But she cannot quote Adam Smith or anyone else saying this.

McCloskey can point to Smith's account in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, justice, and benevolence (part of Christian charity?).  But she cannot find any statement by Smith that these are the bourgeois virtues of a commercial society.

Moreover, she cannot explain why Smith identifies admiration of the rich as "the corruption of our moral sentiments."  In her one-paragraph comment on Smith's chapter against admiring the rich, she observes: "That the Waltons are rich does not make them admirable people, despite the undoubted commercial savvy of Sam and his brother Jim" (Bourgeois Equality, 564).  But this contradicts her claim that the rhetoric of the bourgeois virtues promotes "the admiration for and acceptance of trade-tested betterment" (564).  She also cannot explain why Smith in the Wealth of Nations never identifies businesspeople as virtuous, and why he refers only once to "virtues," and it's a lament that the "laboring poor" in a commercial society suffer a decline "in intellectual, social, and martial virtues" (WN, 782).

Recently, Daniel Klein has offered a much more modest--and more defensible--version of McCloskey's argument.  Using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, Klein shows that after about 1740 people for the first time started writing about "honest merchants" and "honest traders," terms that had almost never appeared before 1740.  For the first time, the profession of merchants and traders was regarded as "honest."  Klein traces this idea to the jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius and others who saw that those who made money through honest dealings--that is, voluntary transactions--had a property right to their wealth that should be protected by law.

But unlike McCloskey, Klein distinguishes honest dealings from virtuous conduct.  Being honest is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being virtuous.

Klein quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville's chapter in Democracy in America on "Why Americans Consider All Honest Callings Honorable" (part 2, chap. 18).  While in aristocracies, "it is not exactly work itself which is despised, but work with an eye to profit."  By contrast, in America, "equality makes not only work itself, but work specifically to gain money, honorable."  "In the United States professions are more or less unpleasant, more or less lucrative, but they are never high or low.  Every honest profession is honorable."

Thus, a bourgeois life in a modern liberal society is regarded as honest and honorable.  But it does not necessarily display all the virtues.  The modern adoption of this idea of bourgeois dignity is enough to explain the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years that has created the world in which most of us live today: the richest, healthiest, freest, and most populous world that human beings have ever experienced in their 200,000 years of evolutionary history.