Azar Gat on War (2): The Failed Rebellion of Ascetic Morality Against the Natural Desires

In his evolutionary study of war, Azar Gat embraces evolutionary theory as "the only non-transcendent mechanism for explaining life's complex design" (144). But then he invokes the fact- value dichotomy in a way that suggests the need for transcendence in human morality.

Gat denies that the "immanent logic" of evolutionary reasoning has any "transcendent measurement." Consequently, "the evolutionary logic in itself has no normative implications." Evolutionary science can tell us about our evolved natural desires, which we should take into account in organizing our individual and social lives. But, then, he says: "We may choose to follow such predispositions or rebel against them. . . . The human brain . . . may come up with more satisfactory arrangements."

This suggests that Gat is adopting a Kantian dualism of the sort that was defended by Thomas Huxley and later adopted by many evolutionary psychologists. If so, then evolutionary science can explain the "natural facts" of human desires but not the "moral values" of human culture and human reason. Human morality requires a "transcendent measurement" that is beyond natural experience. Moral normativity transcends scientific empiricism.

But how exactly does this dualism work in explaining war? In explaining the importance of war in the earliest agricultural societies and in the emergence of the state, Gat indicates that war in these societies was motivated not only by material interests but also by abstract ideas, including transcendent moral and religious views of the cosmos. The invention of writing and the development of literate culture allowed the emergence of religious and philosophic texts that supported grand worldviews and transcendent conceptions of cosmic order. These cosmic belief systems became important for legitimizing war and state power.

Here the moral, religious, and philosophic advances made possible by a literate culture don't deny but rather reinforce the natural desires that lead to war. And yet, Gat also sees a more radical attitude emerging--particularly, in the "Axial Age"--that supports normative ideals that rebel against natural desires. Greek philosophers began to argue that the fullest human happiness was found not in the restless pursuits of war but in the leisured life of pleasure and intellectual activity (438-40). It was not clear, however, that such a life of purely peaceful leisure was possible for all human beings. (Gat might have noted that even in Plato's "city in speech," in the Republic, there had to be warriors.)

Gat points to the asceticism and pacifism of Buddhism as the most radical attempt to rebel against the natural desires of evolved human nature. But he admits that the ascetic ideal was not very successful in stopping war.

Rather than the normal balancing of desires against each other and against possible costs, asceticism involves an attempt at a wholesale suppression of desire and constitutes a rebellion against the evolution-shaped human motivational system. Indeed, it is for this very reason that asceticism has remained marginal in human society, because it has gone against our most deeply rooted, innate predispositions. Seriously attempted only by a very small minority, it has mostly served as an unfulfilled option, a spiritual yearning, a creed, or, at most, a disciplinary constraining factor, for those among the vast majority of people who have felt tortured by the frustrations of desire. (440-41)

Gat goes on to note that ascetic religious believers--in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism--have generally been the best warriors. And even Buddhism has had a tradition of warrior-monks. The history of how the martial arts were cultivated in Buddhist monasteries, and fully integrated into Zen Buddhism, is a remarkable indication of how even the most radical asceticism fails to conquer the natural desires that lead to war.

To me, this casts doubt on Gat's dualistic claim that a normative morality of transcendent ideals is beyond the empirical claims of evolutionary science. The failure of philosophic rationalism and religious asceticism to fully suppress the natural desires of our evolved human nature suggests that human flourishing must conform to those desires. And, if so, we cannot escape the natural desire for courage in war, and thus the yearning for a normative morality of universal love and perpetual peace must always fail.

Some posts on related points can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Discussion of Darwinian Liberal Conservatism at George Mason University

This week, I visited the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. I spoke on "Darwinian Liberal Conservatism."

The Department of Economics at Mason is famous for its free-market and public-choice thinking. This started when James Buchanan moved his Public Choice Center from Virginia Tech to Mason. When Buchanan received his Nobel Prize, this gave special prominence to the Department. Later, Vernon Smith's Nobel Prize added even more distinction to the Department.

My discussions at Mason confirmed my general impression that public choice theorists are open to evolutionary reasoning.

The folks at Mason find it hard to understand why so many conservatives resist evolutionary science. I tried to explain why conservatives are bothered by the fear that Darwinian evolution threatens the belief that human social order rests on cosmic or religious foundations and thus denies cosmic teleology. This conservative fear manifests an underlying nihilism--the nihilistic belief that social order has no natural ground to support it in the absence of a religious belief in transcendent order.

In our discussions, there were at least two sticking points.

The first was group selection. Economists in the classical liberal tradition are often committed to a methodological individualism, and they see any idea of group selection as a treat to this commitment.

The second sticking point arose in our discussion of Hayek. Many of the people at Mason accept Hayek's argument that socialism is an atavistic return to the ancient instincts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who lived in small, face-to-face groups organized around communal norms of distribution according to merit--"social justice." By contrast, life in a modern free society based on extended trade with strangers requires a suppression of these ancient instincts of foraging society.

To me this requires a Freudian view of civilization as the repression of human desires or instincts. This is implausible to me, because it suggests that human beings would have no good reason to live in free society that suppresses all of their natural desires. On the contrary, I believe, a free society succeeds to the degree that it satisfies natural human desires more fully than any other social order, and socialism fails because it frustrates human desires in a way that creates an emotional cost that is unbearable for most human beings.

In response to my criticism of Hayek on this point, the economists answered by suggesting that Hayek was exaggerating his point about socialism as "atavism" and the need for civilization to suppress the instincts--rather, what Hayek really meant to say is that civilization must channel those natural instincts in productive ways. If this is what Hayek meant, I answered, I would agree: natural desires constrain but do not determine cultural traditions.

But if this is what Hayek meant, he was not good in expressing it, particularly in his repeated claims that cultural evolution creates civilization by suppressing the innate desires of human beings (see, for example, "The Three Sources of Human Values," pp. 155-56, 160-61, 163-65, 167-69). Occasionally, Hayek says that civilization requires repressing only "some" of the innate rules (160-61). Then we wonder whether Hayek's "great society" does satisfy at least some natural instincts.

I have taken up this topic in Darwinian Conservatism, pp. 20-26.

"Darwinian Liberal Conservatism" at George Mason University

This Wednesday, April 20, I will be lecturing on "Darwinian Liberal Conservatism" at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

I will be sketching some of my reasoning for how Darwinian science supports a fusion of classical liberalism and traditionalist conservatism, which brings together a Lockean politics of individual liberty and an Aristotelian ethics of social virtue.

This is part of the Center for the Study of Public Choice Seminar Series. The seminar will meet in Carow Hall, 4:00 pm to 5:15 pm.

Gat on War (1): Hunter-Gatherers

Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2006) is one of the best scholarly studies of war ever written. He ranges broadly over many disciplines: animal behavior, evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, and political science. Rather than pursuing a reductive explanation of war as determined by one or a few factors, he encompasses all the major factors influencing the whole history of human warfare over two million years, while showing how evolutionary theory can explain the origins and interrelationships of all of these factors.

He sets out to answer the "riddle of war."

Why do people engage in the deadly and destructive activity of fighting? Is it rooted in nature, or is it a late cultural invention? Have people always engaged in fighting, or did they start to do so only with the advent of agriculture, the state, and civilization? How were these, and later, major developments in human history affected by war, and, in turn, how did they affect war? Under what conditions, if at all, can war be eliminated, and is it declining at present? (p. ix)

His massive study (822 pages) of these questions is divided into three parts corresponding to the three great eras of human history: the era of hunter-gatherers, the era of agrarian civilization and pre-modern states, and the era of the modern nation-states. This first post on the book will be on the first part, which covers the history of war over two million years, the period of hunting-gathering, which constitutes over 99 per cent of human history, in which the genetic evolution of the human species was shaped.

This book has helped me to think through the evolution of war as an evolved natural desire. I have included courage in war as one of the twenty natural desires.

Human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with other groups. Human beings divide themselves into ethnic and territorial groups, and they tend to cooperate more with those people who belong to their own group than with those outside their group. So when the competition between communities becomes severe, violent conflict is likely. Human beings desire war when fear, interest, or honor move them to fight for their community against opposing communities. War shows the best and the worst of human nature. Ware manifests the brutal cruelty of human beings in fighting those they regard as enemies. Yet war also manifests the moral sociality of human beings in fighting courageously for their group. One of the prime causes for the emergence of large, bureaucratic states is the need for increasing military power. War is an instrument of politics, and like political rule generally, warfare is a predominantly male activity.

Of all the desires on my list, this is the one that has provoked the most criticism from my readers, who don't like my claim that war is natural, and that it provides the conditions for displaying moral virtues like courage. Although Gat insists that his study of war has "no normative implications" (144), his reasoning generally supports my position.

We begin with the question of whether war is grounded in human nature, or whether it is a purely cultural invention of human history that transcends animal nature. To answer that question, we must look to what Gat calls the "human state of nature"--the original state of human beings living as hunter-gatherers, which was the state in which the genetic evolution of the human species was formed.

In their evolutionary natural way of life as hunter-gatherers, did humans fight? The enduring debate over this question has been divided between those on the side of Hobbes and those on the side of Rousseau. Hobbes answers that yes, the state of nature was a war of all against all, from which human beings escaped only by establishing a Leviathan state to keep the peace. Rousseau answers that no, the original condition of humans was peaceful. "Aboriginal humans lived sparsely and generally harmoniously in nature, peacefully exploiting her abundant resources. Only with the coming of agriculture, demographic growth, private property, division of class and state coercion, claimed Rousseau, did war, and all the other ills of civilization, spring up" (5).

Gat shows that Hobbes exaggerated the harshness and solitariness of the hunting-gathering way of life. Human beings are naturally social and political animals who began their evolutionary history living in families and in local and regional groups bound together by ties of kinship, language, and culture. But Gat also shows that Hobbes was right in seeing the propensity to warfare as part of the natural condition of humanity.

Thus, Gat resolves the Hobbes-Rousseau debate by concluding that Hobbes was closer to the truth, and he does this by surveying new knowledge drawn from the study of animal aggression, the study of surviving hunter-gatherers, the archaeological evidence for prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and evolutionary theory as providing a general explanatory perspective. Although he does not recognize it, Gat's depiction of the "evolutionary state of nature" conforms closely to the hunter-gatherer state of nature described by John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. This is a good illustration of how modern evolutionary science can clarify, if not resolve, some of the enduring questions in the history of political philosophy.

In examining the issue of war among hunter-gatherers, Gat moves through through three questions. Did they fight? Why did they fight? How did they fight?

DID THEY FIGHT?
In the twentieth century, the anthropological study of war was dominated by the Rousseauean claim that warfare was a recent cultural invention in human history that was not rooted in human nature. Lawrence Keeley's War and Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996) challenged this view with overwhelming evidence of warfare in pre-state societies. But Keeley's argument was weakened by the fact that he concentrated on the Neolithic period, when people adopted agriculture and animal husbandry (about 10,000 years ago), but before the establishment of states. The Rousseaueans could argue that it was the transition to agriculture that was crucial to the emergence of war, because this brought valuable stored food and other property that was worth fighting for. Consequently, the evidence of war in pre-state agricultural societies might not apply to hunter-gatherers who lived prior to 10,000 years ago.

Gat's contribution here is to extend the evidence for warfare back into hunter-gatherer history. Hunter-gatherer society consisted of local groups (20-70 members) and regional groups (an average of 500 members), bound together by language, intermarriage, rituals, exchange, alliances, and military activity. They were nomadic, and they had few possessions. Although they were remarkably egalitarian, because there was no formal and fixed status hierarchy, these societies were not totally equal, because some people who were talented and ambitious could exercise leadership, particularly in war (14, 22, 26, 32, 71-72, 74, 88-92, 138).

Gat's claim about hunter-gatherer warfare is qualified. His claim is "not that all hunter-gatherers invariably fight," because he recognizes that in all human societies throughout history, there are long periods of peace. Here is where Gat disagrees with Konrad Lorenz and others who have argued that human beings have an instinct for killing that must invariably be satisfied in some way. But Gat does claim that there has always been warfare from time to time.

The problem, however, is that the knowledge of the hunting-gathering way of life in the Pleistocene era (from two million to 10,000 years ago) is inherently inconclusive. There is some archaeological evidence for war--for example, burial remains of people apparently killed by violence and rock art depictions of war. The studies of historically recorded hunter-gatherers also shows evidence for war. But here we face the "contact paradox": since hunter-gatherers have no written records, documentary evidence depends on contact with literate people, and this contact can "contaminate" what is being observed. Consequently, the Rousseaueans can always argue that what we see of hunter-gatherers after contact is not the true story of what they looked like before contact.

To overcome this problem, Gat looks for a natural "laboratory"--a case where we can see a hunter-gatherer society that has experienced little or no change from contact with literate people. Gat sees two such "laboratory" cases. The first case is of the "simple" hunter-gatherers in Australia. The second is of "complex" hunter-gatherers in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Although much of the anthropological debate over hunter-gatherers has been dominated by the case of the African Bushmen, Gat rightly insists that it's not the best case to study because the Bushmen had been pushed into desolate environments by competition with other groups.

When Europeans began arriving in Australia in 1788, the remote areas of the interior and the north were the locales for hunter-gatherers who had no agriculture or pastoralism. There were as many as 300,000 hunter-gatherers, in 400-700 regional groups, with 500-600 people each. Their lives were simple. They didn't even have bows. Their only long-range weapon was the boomerang. Although nomadic, their movements were within a circumscribed territory, and they enforced the boundaries of their group territories.

Among these Australian aboriginals, there were violent disputes based on women, murder, and territorial trespass. Although each group enforced a rough equality, there were differences in status and influence, as in leadership by the most skillful warriors. There were trading networks extending over long distances.

The high rates of killing in war was first reported by William Buckley, who arrived in Australia in 1803 as a 13-year-old-boy from England on the first convict ship. Buckley escaped and lived with an Aboriginal tribe for 35 years. He learned their language and participated in their daily activities. Later, his reports on his experiences were recorded. And while there is some dispute over the accuracy of his stories, this seems to be the best account of a hunting-gathering society before any extensive contact with literate people. Buckley's testimony supports Gat's claim that even the simplest kind of hunting-gathering society showed warfare.

A more "complex" form of hunting-gathering society arises in rich wildlife areas, such as swamps, lakes, river mouths, and seashores. In such rich ecological niches, human population can be dense, life is more sedentary, food is accumulated, there is extensive division of labor, trade, and property, with rich individuals exercising control over resources.

The Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America show this kind of society, and they show evidence of warfare and slavery through war stretching back for thousands of years.

This evidence shows that for both "simple" and "complex" hunter-gatherers, warfare was part of the "evolutionary natural way of life."

WHY DID THEY FIGHT?
I agree with Gat that--contrary to Freud, Lorenz, Tinbergen, and Storr--there is no "basic aggression instinct" comparable to the instinctive drives for food and sex. The drives for food and sex are unavoidable. But people can live in peace their entire lives without feeling any distress. Aggression is not a biological end, but a biological means to the primary biological ends.

War is "both innate and optional" (40). It is innate, because humans are naturally inclined to go to war whenever the benefits of war seem greater than the costs. Yet war is optional, because it fluctuates in response to changing conditions of life.

The evolution of war required group selection in which groups bound together by kinship relations, marriage, and cultural identity competed with one another. Religion can be understood as an evolutionary adaptation for cooperation in group selection. Gat agrees with the group-selection explanation of religion developed by David Sloan Wilson, although Gat notes that Wilson "overlooks the military aspect" of this.

Over the past thirty or forty years, there has been an intense debate among anthropologists as to the motivations for war in primitive societies. Some materialist anthropologists like Marvin Harris have stressed the importance of competition for food. Some evolutionary anthropologists like Napoleon Chagnon have stressed the importance of competition for women. According to Chagnon, when he asked Yanomamo men about this, they answered: "We like meat, but we like women a whole lot more."

Gat rightly points out that Chagnon was only partially correct about this, because he did not see how evolutionary theory allows us to see how many different factors can influence war. Evolutionary science suggests that the ultimate causes of adaptive human behavior are either somatic (concerned with the resources necessary for survival) or reproductive (concerned with mating and offspring). Thus, food and sex are primary needs or desires.

Yet there are also many secondary motivations for war that are ultimately instrumental (from the evolutionary perspective) to the somatic and reproductive motivations. These secondary motivations include dominance, revenge, fear, suspicion, supernatural elements, cannibalism, playfulness, adventurism, sadism, and ecstasy.

I see these secondary motivations as tied to various natural desires on my list of twenty--such as social status, political rule, justice as reciprocity, property, and the desire for religious understanding. I also agree with Gat that many of these motivations reflect the distinctly male propensities for risky violence and adventure.

Although the evolutionary explanation of war assumes that military violence is generally adaptive, it also recognizes that there is a lot of maladaptive and purposeless violence. So, for example, the sadism that is sometimes manifest in war can be understood as a deviation from an evolutionarily shaped norm.

HOW DID THEY FIGHT?
Human hunter-gatherers show a pattern of warfare similar to that of chimpanzees. Young adult males form raiding parties that attack only when they outnumber their opponents and thus can minimize the risk to themselves. When opposing groups face one another in open lines of battle, they prefer to engage in ritualistic bluffing displays, rather than going to battle.

There is one crucial difference between the humans and the chimps, however, in that among the human hunter-gatherers, there is a higher rate of mortality for adults. Gat identifies this as a pattern of "asymmetrical, first-strike killing." Hunter-gatherer warriors prefer to launch surprise attacks on their enemies--typically, at night when their victims are asleep and thus vulnerable.

The difference between humans and other animals is that human tool-making allows the humans to increase their offensive capability. But this also makes humans more vulnerable to attack, because as humans become more dependent on tools, their bodies become more slender and less robust than is the case for their primate ancestors. Adult male chimps carry their weapons in their bodies--powerful jaws and a physically strong build. Adult male humans lose this, and thus they become vulnerable to surprise attacks.

As a consequence, human hunter-gatherers are caught in what international relations theorists call the "security dilemma": they live in a state of fear and distrust, anticipating that they are vulnerable to surprise attacks, which inclines them to pre-emptive strikes, which only increases the state of mutual distrust. Thus, they are caught in a kind of "prisoner's dilemma" situation, where everyone is worse off than they would be if they could trust one another to cooperatively keep the peace. Hobbes saw this, and this is what led him to his dark view of the state of nature as full of fear and continual dangers.

Gat concludes this first part of his book by insisting that "the evolutionary logic in itself has no normative implications."

We may choose to follow such predispositions or rebel against them. There is nothing sacred or morally compelling about maximizing survival for the fittest. This is merely the blind, algorithmic mechanism of natural 'design.' The human brain--itself a product of evolution and a powerful instrument of conscious, purposeful, and future oriented, rather than blind, design--may come up with more satisfactory arrangements. (144)

Gat doesn't explain exactly what he has in mind here. Obviously, he is doing what evolutionary psychologists often do to avoid questions about the moral implications of their work: invoke the fact-value distinction and declare that, of course, human beings are free to appeal to moral values formulated by human reason as transcending the factual world of empirical science. But this seems to leave us with a radical dualism where the moral realm of human rational artifice floats free of the natural world. If this is so, then what is most distinctly human cannot be explained by science because it belongs to some kind of transcendental realm--perhaps Kant's realm of human freedom.

I agree that human beings do have some freedom of judgment that comes from their capacity for deliberate thought and choice. But I argue that this human freedom of judgment is constrained both by human nature and by human culture. So, in matters of war and peace, we can look for ways to promote peace and minimize war. But given our natural propensities towards war when we face severe conflicts between groups, we cannot realistically expect to achieve a world of perpetual peace.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here., here., and here.

David Brooks and Evolutionary Conservatism (5): Neoconservative Fascism?

In his recent essay for Cato Unbound, Brad Thompson explains neoconservatism as shaped by the ideas of Leo Strauss as adopted by Irving Kristol. Provocatively, Thompson concludes that this Straussian neoconservatism promotes a "soft, American-style fascism," which combines what Strauss called "the way of Socrates with the way of Thrasymachus," thus combining the idealism of Platonic philosophy and the realism of Machiavellian politics.

Thompson sees this neoconservative political philosophy most fully expressed in what David Brooks--in a series of articles for The Weekly Standard--has called "national-greatness conservatism."

The moral purpose of national-greatness conservatism, according to David Brooks, is to energize the American spirit; to fire the imagination with something majestic; to advance a "unifying American creed"; and to inspire Americans to look beyond their narrow self-interest to some larger national mission--to some mystically Hegelian "national destiny." the new American citizen must be animated by "nationalist virtues" such as "duty, loyalty, honesty, discretion, and self-sacrifice." The neocons' basic moral political principle is clear and simple: the subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the nation-state.

Politically, Brooks's new nationalism would use the federal government to pursue great "nationalistic public projects" and to build grand monuments in order to unify the nation spiritually and to prevent America's "slide" into what he calls "nihilistic mediocrity." It is important that the American people conform, swear allegiance to, and obey some grand central purpose defined for them by the federal government. The ideal American man, he argues, should negate and forgo his individual values and interests and merge his "self" into some mystical union with the collective soul.

Thompson recognizes that his charge of "fascism" is inflammatory. He qualifies this charge somewhat: "This is a serious charge and not one I take lightly. The neocons are not fascists, but I do argue they share some common features with fascism."

At the very least, I would agree with Thompson that there is a troubling tendency to statism in the Straussian neoconservative slogan that "statecraft is soulcraft." What would it mean for the state to use its coercive powers to craft the human soul?

I agree with Douglas Rasmusssen, in his response to Thompson's essay, who argues that when the Straussians assume that the polis shapes the moral character of citizens, they fail to distinguish the polis as society from the polis as state. Human beings are naturally social animals, and thus their moral lives are shaped by all of those natural and voluntary associations of civil society. But this character-forming activity can be carried out by the spontaneous order of society--families, churches, schools, and all kinds of social and economic associations--without the need for the state to impose coercively any comprehensive conception of the best way of life.

In The Social Animal, Brooks sends contradictory messages on this issue. In most of the book, he shows how evolutionary psychology and the cognitive sciences explain the social and moral order of human life as arising from the spontaneous order of civil society. So, for example, in the chapter on "Morality" (Chapter 18), he explains the evolutionary emergence of morality without any need to call in the state to exercise "soulcraft." But, then, in Chapter 20 ("The Soft Side"), he lays out his argument for "national greatness," which he presents as grounded in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton--the tradition of "limited but energetic government"--and here he insists: "Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways. Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft" (323).

This Chapter 20 does not fit into the rest of the book. First, the narrative flow of the book breaks down. After only a couple of pages describing Harold's career as a policy analyst, Brooks launches off on a long statement of his argument for "national greatness," which he attributes to Harold, who becomes a mannequin on which Brooks can hang his ideas.

Moreover, this chapter breaks away from the rest of the book in that Brooks cites no research from cognitive or evolutionary science to support his claims. He does refer to the general theme of the book about human beings as social animals.

Harold believed that the cognitive revolution had the potential to upend these individualistic political philosophies, and the policy approaches that grew from them. The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice. (320)

But if these "relationships" refer to the social networks of civil society, then it's not clear how this supports the idea that "soulcraft" comes from "statecraft."

Furthermore, Brooks rejects statism when he rejects the tradition of socialism. "The nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who had called themselves socialists weren't really socialists. They were statists. They valued the state over society" (321).

This suggests that Brooks values society over the state, and this would be supported by evolutionary and cognitive science. But, then, elsewhere in this chapter, he suggests that the state has to shape the soul when society has failed to do so.

With his soft-side approach, Harold put his faith in programs that reshaped the internal models in people's minds. If you felt, as Harold did, that in some low-income communities achievement values were not being transmitted from one generation to another, then you had no choice but to try to instill them. That meant you had to be somewhat paternalistic. If parents were not instilling these achievement values, then churches and charity groups should try. If these institutions were overwhelmed, then government should try to step in to help people achieve the three things they need to enter the middle class: marriage, a high-school degree, and a job. (330-31)

So where all the institutions of civil society--families, churches, charity groups, and so on--have failed to instill the proper values, the government will take over and "reshape the internal models in people's minds." And yet Brooks gives us no reasons to think that government bureaucrats have the virtue and the knowledge to succeed where civil society has failed. And he gives us no reason to believe that such governmental efforts at "soulcraft" will not become despotic.

He also gives us no reason to believe that this really is in the tradition of Hamilton. He writes:

Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt had been able to assume a level of social and moral capital. They took it for granted that citizens lived in tight communities defined by well-understood norms, a moral consensus, and restrictive customs. Today's leaders could not make that assumption. The moral and social capital present during those years had eroded, and needed to be rebuilt. (334)

So, in other words, the "limited but energetic government" advocated by Hamilton was not designed to craft "social and moral capital." Rather, a Hamiltonian government had to assume that civil society would do the job of shaping moral character. That's why the Constitution of the United States says nothing about the powers of government for shaping the moral and religious values of the nation.

Brooks makes much of a quotation from Daniel Patrick Moynihan about the relationship between politics and culture: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."

In developing this thought, Brooks cites with approval Lawrence Harrison's book The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It from Itself (2006). But Harrison's book does not argue for changing culture through statist coercion. Harrison explains that culture is shaped "chiefly through child rearing practices, religious practice, the education system, the media, and peer relationships" (6). He distinguishes between "progress-prone" cultures and "progress-resistant" cultures. "Progress-prone" cultures are those that have the moral values, economic practices, and political institutions of a liberal bourgeois society. He recognizes that political leaders can help to move a "progress-resistant" culture towards a "progress-prone" culture. Contrary to Brooks, however, he does not say that this comes from mobilizing citizens through governmental programs for "national greatness." Rather, Harrison argues, political leaders promote progressive cultures by opening their countries to social, economic, and political freedom. So, for example, he recommends that political leaders should "pursue open economic policies," "encourage and facilitate home ownership," and "regularize property ownership." Political leaders foster progressive cultures by protecting the individual freedom that allows a civil society to cultivate the bourgeois virtues of a classical liberal regime.

The human soul is best crafted not by the coercive commands of the state but by the spontaneous orders of a free society as shaped by genetic and cultural evolution.

David Brooks and Evolutionary Conservatism (4): Freedom in the Brain

If the human mind is the activity of the human brain, as is generally assumed today by neuroscientists, then we might worry that this denies human freedom and moral responsibility. If my thoughts and actions are ultimately determined by the neural activity of my brain, does that deny that I have any free will? Does that mean that traditional notions of moral and legal responsibility are denied by modern science?

Some readers of David Brooks's The Social Animal might draw that conclusion from his book. After all, the main idea of his book is that our lives are more controlled by our unconscious minds (Level 1), which are shaped deep within the brain, than by our conscious minds (Level 2). Our conscious thoughts and choices, it seems, simply ratify and rationalize what has already been determined by our unconscious mental processing.

And yet, in various parts of the book, Brooks insists that modern cognitive science allows enough room for human freedom to sustain traditional standards of human responsibility. Here his reasoning coincides with what I have argued for in Darwinian Conservatism (Chapter 8) as "the emergence of the soul in the brain."

Brooks declares: "The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious" (xii). We must wonder, How exactly does that "influence" of the conscious mind over the unconscious work?

In Chapter 8 ("Self-Control"), Brooks describes Erica's struggle to keep her irascible temperament from interfering with her tennis. In competition, she would become so angry that she lost control of her game. She had to develop mental techniques for separating herself from her anger and concentrating on performing the task at hand.

She would think about her anger and she would say to herself, "That is not who I am. That is an experience that is happening within me." She imagined a grassy field. On one side was the angry dog of her anger. But on the other was the tennis player who had won her last five matches. She would imagine herself wandering away from the dog and over to the tennis player. (131)

Brooks explains this in the light of psychological studies of how people use habits and strategies for focusing their attention to gain some control over their inner lives. He quotes William James: "The whole drama of voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas might receive. . . . Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of the will."

In his notes, Brooks cites Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (2002). In Darwinian Conservatism, I cite the same book in showing how Schwartz has used techniques for mental concentration to help patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Using brain-imaging technology, Dr. Schwartz has discovered that this therapy actually changes the neuronal activity of the brain so that the activity of the frontal cortex exerts a mental force to activate one circuit rather than another. He calls this "directed mental force." So it seems that the mind that emerges from the human brain can change the brain itself. The emergent power of the brain for mental attention is the natural ground for human freedom.

To understand this kind of freedom, we need to reject the false dichotomy of free will versus determinism, so that we can see how free choice is a certain kind of determinism in which a conscious choice is an effect of unconscious processes that influences its own cause. Instead of linear causality, we need to see a circular causality in which the conscious mind influences its unconscious causes. Neuroscientist Walter Freeman develops this understanding with his "neurodynamic theory" of the mind/brain.

This would support what Brooks says in Chapter 18 ("Morality") about moral responsibility. Brooks tells the story of Erica's one act of adultery, her remorse afterwards, and her resolve that she will never again allow the temptation to infidelity to destroy her marriage. Erica chooses to frame her life as a story of fall and redemption--her weakness in falling into temptation and her strength in choosing to redeem herself by committing herself to Harold as her true love.

Brooks explains this as consistent with the cognitive science of morality and responsibility. Adopting the "intuitionist" view of Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt, Brooks argues that while moral choices are shaped by moral emotions and unconscious drives, rather than by purely rational conceptions of moral imperatives, there is still room for moral reflection that gives us some freedom of choice. We can consciously influence the habits and dispositions that give us some control over our moral sentiments.

This is not an absolute freedom. This is not free will understood as an uncaused cause that acts from some transcendent realm of pure freedom beyond nature. Rather, this is a freedom within our human nature to exercise some influence over those hidden forces deep in our unconscious that direct our lives.

Some posts on related themes can be found here and here.

David Brooks and Evolutionary Conservatism (3): Emotional Choice Theory

About twenty years ago, I was interviewed for a faculty position in the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester. The Department was widely regarded as one of the preeminent political science departments in the United States, particularly for those interested in applying "rational choice theory" to political science. Beginning in 1962, when William Riker became Chair of the Department, the Department became known for specializing in research that employed game theory to study politics based on the economic model of human beings as rational maximiser's of their self-interest.

Although I respected the work of Riker and his colleagues, I thought that their model of Homo economicus was only partially true, because its view of human nature was too rationalistic and egoistic to capture the reality of human beings as emotional and social animals. In a job talk that was entitled "Emotional Choice Theory," I argued that an evolutionary science of human nature shows that human beings are not just rational egoists, but also social animals moved by moral emotions.

Predictably, my talk was not well received, and I didn't get the job.

If I were giving the same talk today, I hope I would be a little more persuasive, because I could build on all of the research in evolutionary theory and neuroscience over the last twenty years that casts doubt on the rational choice model of Homo economicus. I could benefit from David Brooks's The Social Animal as an engaging survey of that research.

Brooks introduces the main themes of this research in his first chapter--entitled "Decision Making." This chapter sets the pattern for all the other chapters: a title that states the facet of human life that's the topic for the chapter, a narration of some events in the fictional story of Harold and Erica that illustrate the topic, and then a review of the scientific research on that topic.

The story in this chapter is how the parents of Harold--Rob and Julia--first met and fell in love. Brooks begins with the decision about whom to marry because this is the most important decision that most of us make in our lives. Moreover, all of us are products of this decision as made by our parents.

The subject of this chapter sets the themes for the whole book: how the deepest influences on our decisions arise largely from unconscious decisions, in being shaped by human genetic history and cultural history, rather than from conscious and rational calculations of individual interests.

Introduction (pp. 3-5)
Brooks begins with a mocking sketch of the "Composure Class," those high-status men and women who have climbed the American ladder of meritocratic success, so that "wealth had just settled down upon them like a gentle snow."

Brooks's writing here is amusing, but some readers will find this a bit discordant in that the comic irony of his style doesn't seem to fit the serious tone of his writing about Harold and Erica. For example, he writes:

So Mr. Casual Elegance married Ms. Sculpted Beauty in a ceremony officiated by Bill and Melinda Gates, and they produced three wonderful children: Effortless Brilliance, Global Compassion, and Artistically Gifted. Like most upper- and upper-middle-class children, these kids are really good at obscure sports. Centuries ago, members of the educated class discovered that they could no longer compete in football, baseball, and basketball, so they stole lacrosse from the American Indians to give them something to dominate.

Even if Brooks's literary skill hardly matches that of Jane Austen, there is a similarity between them in their combination of irony and seriousness in depicting the human pursuit of happiness, particularly as displayed in the decision about whom to marry.

The Meeting (pp. 5-10)
Hoping someday to join the Composure Class, Rob and Julia are young professionals who go to a swanky resort community. A mutual friend arranges for them to meet for a blind lunch date.

Relying on David Buss and other researchers on the evolutionary psychology of heterosexual attraction, Brooks comments on the differences between men and women in courtship. Men are looking for visual cues of fertility. Women are looking for indications that a man might be worthy of trust. "So while Rob was looking at cleavage, Julia was looking for signs of trustworthiness. She didn't need to do this consciously--thousands of years of genetics and culture had honed her trusting sensor" (8). So Brooks recognizes both genetic evolution and cultural evolution as shaping their behavior.

Brooks also recognizes the importance of individual temperament. In the case of Julia, "she had a hypercritical inner smart-ass" that was an impediment to any man trying to get close to her.

I see here at least three levels of analysis--human nature, human culture, and human individuals.

The Meal (pp. 10-14)
Rob and Julia begin their courtship while sharing a meal. "As destiny would have it, Rob and Julia were meant for each other. Despite what you've heard about opposites attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves."

Relying on Helen Fisher and others, Brooks explains how people seek out others like themselves, because "familiarity breeds trust." Discovering that they have many common interests and experiences, a couple begins to feel that they were destined for one another. Brooks demystifies this feeling of destiny. "People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles. The coincidences gave their relationship an aura of destiny fulfilled."

Brooks observes that most of the emotional communication in flirting is nonverbal and unconscious. "Unawares, Julia did the head cant women do to signal arousal, a slight tilt of the head that exposed her neck . . . there she was like any Marilyn Monroe wannabe--doing the hair flip, raising her arms to adjust her hair, and heaving her chest up into view."

And yet the verbal side of courtship is important as well. For example, men show their intelligence by displaying their large vocabulary. Here is where Brooks cites the research of Geoffrey Miller on "verbal courtship theory," which Thomas Nagel dismissed as "idiotic."

Brooks suggests that courtship is ultimately an exercise in rational calculation, which should satisfy the rational choice theorists. But most of this reasoning is done unconsciously.

Like veteran stock-market traders, people respond in predictable, if unconscious, ways to the valuations of the social marketplace. They instinctively seek the best possible return on their market value.

The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. The more beautiful the woman, the richer the man. A woman's attractiveness is an outstanding predictor of her husband's annual income.

Along with everyone else, Rob and Julia were doing these sorts of calculations unconsciously in their heads--weighing earnings-to-looks ratios, calculating social-capital balances. And every signal suggested they had found a match.

The Stroll (pp. 15-17)
As they walked out of the restaurant, Rob and Julia were "unaware they were already doing the lovers' walk--bodies close to each other, beaming out at the space in front of them with a wide-open glee."

This was one sign that they were making a decision about marriage. Their culture helped them to make this decision by giving them "a social script that applies to first dates in their culture." This is an example of how human culture helps us to restrain and channel our natural desires. "The tension of courtship is produced by the need to slow down when the instincts want to rush right in."

Here we can see Brooks's evolutionary conservatism. Like all conservatives, Brooks sees the importance of cultural traditions--such as the social norms for courtship--in helping human beings to make prudent decisions about how best to satisfy natural desires like sexual mating and conjugal bonding. Evolutionary science allows Brooks to see how cultural traditions are constrained but not determined by genetic evolution, and how individual judgments--such as deciding whom to marry--are constrained but not determined both by genetic nature and social culture. Thus it is that deciding what we want arises from a complex interaction of nature, culture, and judgment.

Such decisions are largely made unconsciously and emotionally, rather than by conscious acts of pure reason. That's why Brooks endorses the famous quotation from Blaise Pascal about how the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of. This belongs to an old intellectual tradition of biological and rhetorical psychology that goes back to Aristotle, which understands human decisions as arising from the interaction of reason and emotion, head and heart.

Love's Role (pp. 17-21)
Citing the research of neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, Brooks describes the role of emotion in decision making as working through an "Emotional Positioning System."

Like the Global Positioning System that might be in your car, the EPS senses your current situation and compares it to the vast body of data it has stored in memory. It reaches certain judgments about whether the course you are on will produce good or bad outcomes, and then it coats each person, place, or circumstance with an emotion (fear or excitement, admiration or repugnance) and an implied reaction ("Smile" or "Don't smile," "Approach" or "Get away") that helps us to navigate our days.

This shows the error of Descartes in separating the brain from the body, because the mental and the physical are inseparably connected in complex networks of sensations, perceptions, and emotions. Pure reason by itself cannot move us without the motive power of emotion. But emotion can lead us astray, and so we need reason to elicit and direct emotion towards the flourishing life that we seek.

Implications (pp. 21-22)
Brooks concludes: "Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic." We should see, then, that "the key to a well-lived life is to have trained the emotions to send the right signals and to be sensitive to their subtle calls."

Brooks stresses that Rob and Julia are not deep thinkers. In fact, they're rather shallow. But they have the social intelligence that allows them to make a decision about marriage that will lead them to happiness.

Rob and Julia were assigning value to each other. They felt themselves swept along in some strong and delightful current that was carrying them toward someplace they deliriously wanted to go. This wasn't the sort of dissecting analysis Julia's inner smart-ass had used when she first glimpsed Rob. This was a powerful, holistic appraisal that followed an entirely different set of rules. Julia would fall in love and then invent reasons for her attraction later. That day she and Rob began wandering together down a path that would be the most rewarding of their lives.

In showing how modern cognitive science helps us to see this "holistic appraisal" in human decision making that combines reason and emotion, Brooks shows us how modern science confirms the moral psychology of the British and Scottish Enlightenments, in which rational judgment and moral sentiment are inextricably intertwined. One can see this, for example, in the following passage from David Hume's appendix on "moral sentiments" in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals:

Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects, as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: The other has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation. Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown: After all circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation. The standard of the one, being founded on the nature of things, is eternal and inflexible, even by the will of the Supreme Being: The standard of the other, arising from the internal frame and constitution of animals, is ultimately derived from the Supreme Will, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several classes and others of existence.

The ultimate source of these two standards as grounded in "the nature of things" and "the internal frame and constitution of animals" might be, as Hume indicates, the will of the Supreme Being. But evolutionary science also allows us to see how these standards of reason and sentiment could have arisen by natural evolution, perhaps as the process by which the Supreme Being chose to work His creative will.

"The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue"--A Video

Last November, I lectured on "The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue" at Berry College as part of the "Stuck With Virtue" conference. I have just noticed that a video of my lecture is now available online.

I have written about my reaction to this conference in a previous post.

Darwinian Liberalism, Revisited

Last July, I wrote a series of three essays for Cato Unbound on "Darwinian Liberalism." Having just reread those essays--and the "reaction essays" from PZ Myers, Lionel Tiger, and Herbert Gintis--I now see that there are four major ways in which Darwinian science supports classical liberalism.

First, Darwinian science supports classical liberalism's devotion to the British Enlightenment tradition of thought as opposed to the French Enlightenment tradition. Although I don't explicitly make this point in my Cato Unbound essays, I elaborate this point in Darwinian Conservatism.

In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Friedrich Hayek distinguished between two traditions of liberty associated with England and France.

we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic--the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalist, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline. (54-55)

Later, Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions (2002) showed how much of the ideological debate over the past two hundred years could be understood as a debate between the "constrained vision" of the British tradition and the "unconstrained vision" of the French Tradition. Then, Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Englightenments (2004) sketched the history of these competing Enlightenment visions.

I have argued that Darwinian science is on the side of the realist vision of the British tradition of liberty. The central idea of this realist vision is evolution--the idea that social order is largely spontaneously evolved rather than rationally designed. Darwin's theory of biological and cultural evolution grew out of the social theory of evolved, spontaneous order that was developed by Adam Smith and others in the Scottish and British Enlightenments. Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate (2002), showed how modern biological research on human nature confirms the insight of the realist vision that there is a universal human nature--imperfect in knowledge and virtue--that cannot be radically changed by social reform. Most recently, David Brooks's The Social Animal (2011) argues that recent research in cognitive science supports the British tradition against the French Tradition.

The second way in which Darwinian science supports classical liberalism is in supporting the liberal distinction between society and state. Darwin's evolutionary explanation of the moral sense shows how moral order can arise through the natural and voluntary associations of civil society without the need for coercive governmental enforcement by the state. This sustains the classical liberal distinction between the political order of the state as protecting individual liberty and the moral order of society as shaping virtuous character. Consequently, a Darwinian liberalism can combine an Aristotelian ethics of social virtue and a Lockean politics of individual liberty.

Regrettably, many thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition of political thought--particularly, Leo Strauss and his followers--fail to recognize this distinction between society and the state, because they don't see the ambiguity in the ancient Greek conception of the polis as signifying both a society and a state. Here is where I agree with Douglas Rasmussen--in a recent essay for Cato Unbound--who criticizes the Straussians for ignoring this distinction and for refusing to consider how this distinction supports a union of Aristotelian virtue and Lockean liberty.

The third way in which Darwinian science supports classical liberalism is in showing how moral order can be grounded on purely human sources of order--human nature, human culture, and human judgment--without any necessity for appealing to supernatural or cosmic sources. This is important for classical liberalism because if the liberal principle of equal liberty for human beings depends upon some religious conception of human beings as divinely created, then it would seem that a liberal regime would have to enforce some theocratic conception of moral order as grounded in religious belief, which would deny the liberty of thought that is crucial for liberal thought.

The fourth way in which Darwinian science supports classical liberalism is in confirming the liberal history of government as set forth in the political anthropology of Locke, Hume, and Smith. An evolutionary history of government manifests three eras in political history: the Paleolithic era of egalitarian hierarchy in foraging societies, the pre-modern era of despotic hierarchy in agrarian states, and the modern era of egalitarian hierarchy in commercial liberal republics.

In this history, we see the difficulty in combining freedom and civilization. Foraging societies were free but uncivilized. Agrarian states were civilized but unfree. Commercial liberal republics are both free and civilized.

We can judge this history to be progressive insofar as it's a cultural history of trial and error in trying out various ways of organizing society and politics, as a result of which we eventually see the emergence of modern liberal regimes as successful because they happen to satisfy the full range of natural human desires more adequately than any prior regimes.

Some previous posts on related themes can be found here, here, and here.

David Brooks and Evolutionary Conservatism (2): Verbal Courtship Theory

David Brooks's The Social Animal is an ambitious, and therefore risky, book.

One can see that in how he summarizes hundreds of research reports in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. He describes this as a "perilous enterprise," because many of these studies are in dispute, and it's often impossible to briefly summarize complex research in ways that convey the complexity and nuance in the work. He admits that he won't satisfy all of his readers, but he notes that he has "tried to direct readers to sources where they can read about the original work and draw their own conclusions about its implications" (377-78). And, indeed, his notes with research citations take up 26 pages of small print at the back of the book.

Consequently, any careful reader of Brooks's book will have to read some of the research he cites in order to judge whether his claims are warranted or not. I foresee that when I use this book as a text in an undergraduate class, I will ask my students to do that--to read some of the original research for themselves and then assess its plausibility for supporting Brooks's arguments.

It's clear, however, that some of the early reviewers of Brooks's book have not done this. For example, in his review in the New York Times Book Review, Thomas Nagel complains: "Brooks seems willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic: for example, that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates." It's easy to dismiss such as claim as "idiotic" without actually scrutinizing the research that supports it.

The passage in the book that Nagel finds so "idiotic" comes in the context of Brooks's story of how Harold's parents--Rob and Julia--first met for a blind lunch date. After describing the flow of their conversation and how much they enjoyed talking with one another, Brooks cites some research in evolutionary psychology that might explain the importance of language for sexual mating:

Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words?

Miller believes that humans learn the words so they can more effectively impress and sort out potential mates. He calculates that if a couple speaks for two hours a day, and utters on average three words a second, and has sex for three months before conceiving a child (which would have been the norm on the prehistoric savanna), then a couple will have exchanged about a million words before conceiving a child. That's a lot of words, and plenty of opportunities for people to offend, bore, or annoy each other. It's ample opportunity to fight, make up, explore, and reform. If a couple is still together after all that chatter, there's a decent chance they'll stay together long enough to raise a child.

Harold's parents were just in the first few thousand words of what, over the course of their lifetimes, would be millions and millions, and things were going fabulously. . . . (13)

The reader who checks the endnotes for this passage will see that Brooks is citing Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (Random House, 2000), pages 369-75. This is a book surveying recent evidence and theorizing in biology and psychology supporting Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection--the idea that both human sexes have evolved ways of displaying cues of fitness that attract mates. The passage cited by Brooks is part of a chapter on "verbal courtship theory," which tries to explain how human verbal behavior might have evolved to make human beings more attractive to potential mates.

Miller's reasoning in this particular passage moves through eight steps. Throughout the passage, Miller uses words like "may" and "perhaps" to suggest how tentative his conclusions are. And yet Miller's arguments and evidence are impressive enough to make a powerful case for his theory that the size of a human adult's vocabulary has evolved through a history of mate choice.

Miller's first step is to point out that the typical adult vocabulary of 60,000 words is excessive, because it surpasses what we need for pragmatic communication. The most frequent 100 words account for about 60 percent of all conversation, and the most frequent 4,000 words account for about 98 percent. Why do we need all these words? If we have the word "blue," why do we need "azure," "cobalt," "sapphire," "ultramarine," "cerulean," and "indigo"?

His second step is to show that artificial languages and "pidgin" languages can satisfy the practical needs of life with very small vocabularies. In the 1920s, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards developed what they called Basic English. With an English vocabulary of 850 words, this language could serve all the purposes of everyday practical life. Similarly, pidgin languages are developed when people with different languages have to communicate with one another for practical purposes, and these languages have very small vocabularies. This shows that the much larger vocabularies of normal human languages are not necessary for pragmatic communication.

Miller's third step is to note an analogy to bird song. Most bird song evolves through mate choice. Some birds--such as nightingales--have a large repertoire of courtship songs (over a thousand), and this seems to be because those males who sing more songs are more attractive to mates, which seems to arise because a larger song repertoire of songs is an indicator of intelligence and learning abilities that enhance fitness.

Miller's fourth step is to note that vocabulary size varies greatly among human beings, and it seems to indicate factors of intelligence and learning ability that are highly heritable and indicators of fitness. Consequently, our ancestors would have benefited by selecting mates with large vocabularies that would have indirectly indicated fitness.

Miller's fifth step is to indicate that although most human beings are probably not consciously aware that they prefer mating with someone who has a large vocabulary, there is some evidence that couples in long-term relationships are similar to one another in the size of their vocabularies. Since intelligence testing indicates that the size of one's vocabulary correlates with one's IQ, choosing mates based on their vocabularies is an unconscious inference about their intelligence.

Miller's sixth step is to point to how, in the film Mary Poppins, the song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" highlights the power of unusual words to advertise intelligence.

Miller's seventh step is to admit that his verbal courtship theory has not yet been fully tested:

To test this verbal courtship theory of vocabulary properly, we would have to find out much more about human verbal behavior than language researchers know at present. We don't know the size of typical ancestral or tribal vocabularies. We don't know whether people use more impressively obscure words during courtship. We don't know whether large vocabularies are valued directly in human mate choice. We don't know how vocabulary sizes correlate with brain size, physical health, physical attractiveness, fertility, or general fitness. Sex differences in the distribution of vocabulary sizes are rarely reported in the scientific literature (though they are perfectly well known to the Educational Testing Service that administers the SAT). (374-75)

After this concession as to the need for more study to test his theory, Miller concludes by affirming that the evidence and reasoning that he has presented should at least suggest the plausibility of explaining the large size of human vocabularies as evolving through sexual selection just like the song repertoires in some bird species.

For Thomas Nagel to flippantly dismiss all this as "idiotic" is . . . well, idiotic.

David Brooks and Evolutionary Conservatism (1): The British Enlightenment

"This is the happiest story you've ever read. It's about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives. They had engrossing careers, earned the respect of their friends, and made important contributions to their neighborhood, their country, and their world."

That's how David Brooks begins his new book--The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. The tone of comic irony in these opening lines and in other parts of the book seems oddly discordant, because it undercuts the seriousness of Brooks's intention in surveying the recent research in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to explain human nature and human happiness.

In fact, the early reviews that I have seen--by Thomas Nagel (The New York Times), Alan Wolfe (The New Republic), Will Wilkinson (Forbes.com), and PZ Myers (Salon.com)--have all been so scornful of the book that I wonder whether Brooks loses many of his readers from the opening lines.

And yet, in contrast to these reviewers, I find this to be one of the most intellectually stimulating books that I have read in recent years. So I have to wonder what it is that I see in the book that would explain why my reaction is so different from these reviewers.

I'll have to admit that one explanation for this might be that I happen to agree with a lot of what Brooks is arguing. But I also happen to disagree with parts of this book--particularly, one chapter (Chapter 20: "The Soft Side") that seems to me to be the weakest part of the book. I'll explain that disagreement in a future post. Here I'll explain my main point of agreement.

The uniqueness of the book is the attempt to fuse a fictional narrative and an intellectual argument in a manner that, as Brooks indicates, follows the model of Rousseau's Emile. Just as Rousseau uses the story of Emile and Sophie to illustrate his philosophic teaching about human nature and human society, Brooks uses his story of Harold and Erica to illustrate his understanding of how modern cognitive science illuminates human psychology.

The title of each chapter indicates some feature of human nature--such as "Attachment," "Culture," or "Morality." Brooks narrates some events in the life of Harold and Erica that illustrate that theme. He then surveys some of the recent research in cognitive science that explains the relevant facet of human psychology, and he draws out the implications of this for social life and public policy.

The primary idea running throughout the book is the supremacy of the unconscious mind (Level 1) over the conscious mind (Level 2). He explains:

I want to show you what this unconscious system looks like when it is flourishing, when the affections and aversions that guide us every day have been properly nurtured, the emotions educated. Through a thousand concrete examples, I am going to try to illustrate how the conscious and unconscious minds interact, how a wise general can train and listen to the scouts. To paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan from another context, the central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious. (xii)

Moreover, he sees this as vindicating a philosophic position, which he identifies with the British Enlightenment, and this is the general point of agreement between Brooks's book and my defense of evolutionary or Darwinian conservatism:

Brain research rarely creates new philosophies, but it does vindicate some old ones. The research being done today reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connectedness over individual choice, character over IQ, emergent, organic systems over linear, mechanistic ones, and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self. If you want to put the philosophic implications in simple terms, the French Enlightenment, which emphasizes reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasizes sentiments, wins. (xiii)

In Brooks's fictional narrative, Harold writes a book about the British Enlightenment. Harold explains to Erica that the British Enlightenment included thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, while the French Enlightenment included those in the tradition of Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet. Those in the British Enlightenment were not irrationalists, who denied the importance of reason. But they did stress the limitations of reason and the importance of emotion and desire as guiding reason. Moreover, they believed that morality was rooted in moral sentiments or emotions rather than the logical deductions of pure reason. And while those in the French Enlightenment looked to human reason as the source of the deliberately designed order of human morality and politics, those in the British Enlightenment saw social order as largely evolved rather than designed.

This distinction between the British and French traditions was originally developed by Friedrich Hayek. It was then developed by Thomas Sowell--in his book A Conflict of Visions--as an ideological debate between a realist vision of social order and a utopian vision.

In Darwinian Conservatism, I adopted this distinction and argued that Darwinian science is on the side of the realist vision of the conservative tradition. As Sowell indicates, the central idea of the realist vision is evolution--the idea that social order is spontaneously evolved rather than rationally designed. Hayek understood this, and he saw that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection grew out of the social theory of evolved, spontaneous order that was developed by Adam Smith and others in the Scottish and British Enlightenments.

Insofar as Brooks argues for cognitive science supporting the philosophic tradition of the British Enlightenment, he seems to be close to what I have identified as evolutionary conservatism. But I can't be sure about this, because he is unclear about two crucial points.

First, although he occasionally acknowledges the importance of reason as interacting with emotion or sentiment in human life, he generally suggests that human behavior is so largely shaped by the unconscious that it's not clear that he leaves any room at all for rational judgment. This denies the insight of the British Enlightenment that while pure reason by itself cannot account for moral and political order, there is still room for prudential judgment to exercise influence in human affairs.

The second possible point of disagreement is that while Brooks generally argues that moral habits and customs are best shaped by the spontaneous order of civil society rather than by the coercion of government, his affirmation that "statecraft is soulcraft" suggests a statist enforcement of moral order.

I will have more to say about these and related points.

Another Unconstitutional War? America's Elective Monarchy

Republican House Speaker John Boehner has been quoted as expressing some concerns about President Barack Obama's war against Libya. "Before any further military commitments are made, the administration must do a better job of communicating to the American people and to Congress about our mission in Libya and how it will be achieved."

What's remarkable about such a comment is how Boehner takes it for granted that the President of the United States can go to war by his own decision, while the Congress waits passively for the President's explanation for his decision. Notice that no one inside or outside the Congress is saying anything about the fact that the Constitution of the United States clearly grants to the Congress the power to declare war. What this means, of course, is that that part of the Constitution has been set aside. In effect, the power to declare war has become a prerogative of the President.

We should remember what Senator Barack Obama said in criticizing the Bush administration: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

But now, President Obama--the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!--adds Libya to a long list of Muslim countries against which he has ordered bombing attacks. The list includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

This presidential usurpation of the congressional power to declare war shows that the President has become an elected monarch, and thus confirms Machiavelli's claim that even in supposedly republican forms of government, there is a natural tendency for the people to want rule by a prince.

During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, one of the major complaints from opponents of the Constitution was that the President would become a king. In The Federalist, Number 67, Alexander Hamilton complained that this was a false charge. "Here the writers against the Constitution seem to have taken pains to signalize their talent of misrepresentation. Calculating upon the aversion of the people to monarchy, they have endeavored to enlist all their jealousies and apprehensions in opposition to the intended President of the United States; not merely as the enbryo, but as the full-grown progeny, of that detested parent."

In Number 69 of The Federalist, Hamilton compared the powers of the President and the King of Great Britain, and he argued that on some crucial points, the American President would not have monarchic powers. One crucial point concerned the war powers of the President:

The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with tht of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies,--all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.

Clearly, then, that only Congress can declare war was for Hamilton a primary distinction between the powers of the President and the powers of the British king. But now that the power to declare war has become a presidental power, the presidency has become more monarchic.

Of course, many of Hamilton's critics accused him of favoring monarchy and of pushing the American presidency towards monarchy. These criics understood that there is a natural disposition towards princely rule because of the tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a single person, particualrly in time of war.

This is evident in Locke's Second Treatise, in Locke's indication that even in popular forms of government, the people are inclined to yield to princely prerogative powers in war. Hamilton and other defenders of the Constitution tried to argue that the American president would not have the prerogative powers of a king. But the history of American government shows the tendency of the American presidency to become an elected monarchy.

Does this indicate that like other primates, human beings are naturally inclined to rule by alpha males, especially in times of war and emergency?

This points back to some of my recent posts on the Machiavellian character of primate politics.

In their recent book--The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic--Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule argue that the expansion of presidential power means that the United States is no longer a Madisonian republic of "liberal legalism," because now the concentrated powers of the president are checked not by law but by politics and public opinion. They see this as a vindication, in some respects, of Carl Schmitt's criticism of liberal legalism and advocacy of executive prerogative. Similar arguments have been made by Harvey Mansfield and other followers of Leo Strauss for the supremacy of presidential power as the "rule of one wise man."

Some of my posts on Mansfield's arguments can be found here, here, and here.

Mansfield's review of The Executive Unbound can be found here.

Darwinian Lessons from the Earthquake in Japan

There are at least two Darwinian lessons from the earthquake in Japan.

The first lesson is that the universe is not moral. There is no good reason to believe that the victims of earthquakes are being punished for their bad conduct. We can try to explain how earthquakes happen. But we can never explain why they happen. Because earthquakes don't have purposes. They don't arise from the intentional action of a mind. And they certainly don't arise as a manifestation of a cosmic moral law. The natural universe does not care about us or for us.

Of course, those who believe in God as the providential Creator of the universe might believe that everything in the universe--including earthquakes--shows God's cosmic moral law at work. But this belief requires a faith in revelation that goes beyond ordinary natural experience.

Many of my critics have argued that Darwinian natural right cannot support human morality, because moral order requires a cosmic teleology so that human morality can be judged by its conformity to a cosmic moral law. But my response to this is to point out that a cosmic teleology requires belief in a cosmic God, or cosmic Nature, or cosmic Reason that manifests cosmic purposefulness. Such a belief cannot be sustained by natural human experience--by experience with earthquakes and other natural disasters that show that the natural world is not guided by any kind of moral teleology.

The second lesson from the earthquake in Japan is that human morality can be rooted in human biology without the support of a moral cosmology. The human suffering in Japan has aroused sympathy from human beings around the world, which will lead us to want to help in the relief of that suffering. The universe does not care about what happens to us. But we care about what happens to us. Even without a cosmic teleology, we can see how moral order manifests the immanent teleology of human nature that inclines human beings to care about human welfare. This moral teleology is rooted not in a cosmic God, cosmic Nature, or cosmic Reason, but in human nature, human culture, and human judgments.

Contrary to the Platonic and Kantian rationalists, this human morality is not a dictate of pure reason, because reason without desire or emotion does not move us to action. If we care about human suffering in Japan, it is not because of our reasoning from a priori principles but because of our moral sentiments as expressions of our fellow-feeling for other human beings. As Hume observed, "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."

Of course, our moral sentiments are not absolutely indiscriminate or impartial. Those of us who are far away from Japan and who have no family or friends there will support the relief efforts--perhaps by contributing a little money--but we won't make great sacrifices. Our moral sentiments are not selfless but self-centered. We are naturally social animals. But that natural sociality shows a structure in which we care more for those attached to us--our family members, our friends, our fellow citizens--than we do for distant strangers. We can extend our sympathy to wider and wider circles of humanity--and even out to nonhuman animals--but typically our sympathy for those near the center of the circle will be stronger than for those on the edge of the circle. Our natural morality--the morality of our evolved human nature--does not incline us to universal love (like that taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount).

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, and here.

The Rationalist Strikes Back: Thomas Nagel on David Brooks' Moral Biology

Today, we all live in the world of Charles Darwin.

If we're looking for some intellectually credible explanation for our human place in the universe, there is today no plausible alternative to Darwinian evolutionary science. Because of Darwin, we now know what we are and where we came from. We are those remarkably smart, social primates with a unique suite of natural desires and capacities--including language, morality, and self-awareness--that has arisen through natural and cultural evolution.

The pervasive influence of this grand Darwinian story is now being extended beyond the natural sciences into the social sciences and humanities. We can see that this spring in the public debate surrounding two new books that are offering powerful arguments for a Darwinian paradigm for the social sciences. Next month, we'll see Frank Fukuyama's new book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, which is the first volume in what some people are calling Fukuyama's magnum opus. Having seen some of Fukuyama's lecture notes for some of the material going into this book, I foresee that this will become one of the leading statements of Darwinian political science.

The other book has just been published--David Brooks' The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. Brooks surveys the research in evolutionary psychology as supporting an Aristotelian conception of human nature and human happiness. To illustrate his points, Brooks tells the story of one composite American couple--Harold and Erica. As Brooks indicates, he intends to employ the technique of Rousseau's Emile, in using a fictional narrative to illustrate his account of human nature.

Since I am now reading Brooks' book, I was interested in the review of the book by Thomas Nagel in the New York Times Book Review.

Nagel is a prominent philosopher at New York University. In 1978, he wrote one of the first responses to E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology coming from a philosopher. Like most philosophers at the time, Nagel showed the reaction of a Platonic transcendentalist in denigrating Wilson's biological account of morality. Nagel rejected sociobiological ethics because it failed to see that ethics is "an autonomous theoretical subject" like mathematics that belongs to a transcendent realm of pure logic. He argued that ethics exists at two levels--the behavioral and the theoretical. And while he acknowledged that biology could illuminate the behavioral level of ethics--the patterns of ethical action as motivated by moral emotions--he dismissed biology as irrelevant to the theoretical level of ethics as concerned with rational standards of moral justification and criticism. Insofar as morality is a matter of normative reasoning, it has nothing to do with any empirical science of human behavior.

With my memory of this essay, I was not surprised to see Nagel criticizing Brooks's book. Here we see the fundamental debate that has been the subject of many of my posts--the conflict between a Platonic or Kantian transcendentalism and an Aristotelian or Humean empiricism. Brooks shows how a Darwinian moral psychology confirms the Aristotelian and Humean tradition of empirical ethics, which will provoke the opposition of Platonic and Kantian transcendentalists like Nagel.

Nagel suggests at least four criticisms of Brooks's book. First, Nagel scorns Brooks's story of Harold and Erica as lacking any psychological depth that would engage our interest in them as vivid characters: "they do not come to life; they and their supporting cast are mannequins for the display of psychological and social generalizations."

I agree that Brooks's story lacks the narrative power of a good novel. But, at least, the story does succeed in the same way that Rousseau's Emile succeeds in providing concrete illustrations of some generalizations about human life.

Brooks's main argument is that the human mind works at two levels--the conscious and the unconscious--and that the unconscious mind is more important in shaping our lives. Nagel's second criticism is his complaint that Brooks does not clearly separate these two realms, because much of what Brooks identifies as unconscious--such as emotions, desires, character traits, and perceptions--could also be seen as parts of conscious experience. But then Nagel essentially concedes Brooks's point in admitting that to a large degree these conscious experiences are not fully under direct conscious control.

Nagel's third criticism is that Brooks is too credulous in accepting some "idiotic" claims by cognitive scientists--"for example, that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates." But, then, Nagel admits that much of the research reported by Brooks is persuasive and not easily dismissed.

Nagel's fourth criticism expresses the fundamental dispute. Although Brooks does say that reason is important for human moral judgment, his argument that emotion and other unconscious motivations and perceptions drive moral experience tends to deny the supremacy of reason in ruling over the passions, which thus rejects the philosophical rationalism that Nagel and other moral philosophers take for granted. Brooks says that conscious reasoning gives us some control over our moral choices because "we can choose the narrative we tell about our lives." So, for example, when Erika commits adultery, she immediately feels a deeply painful regret for what she has done. And contrary to what Nagel says about the story of Harold and Erica being "without interest," I find Brooks's description of how Erika is seduced by "Mr. Make-Believe" and is then thrown into agonizing remorse to be a moving narrative that elicits our sympathetic understanding. This story is a good illustration of what Darwin says about the experience of regret in shaping our moral deliberation. Erika responds to her moral crisis by telling herself a "story of drift and redemption"--a story of a woman who drifted away from her moral anchors until she found her way back to her moral commitments to a husband that she truly loved.

"Amid the tangled jostle of unconscious forces," Brooks observes, "the intuitionist still leaves room for reason and reflection," because "we can choose the narrative we tell about our lives." Nagel objects that this doesn't provide us any rational standards for choosing one narrative over another. He writes:

Experiments show that human beings feel greater sympathy for those who resemble them--racially, for example--than for those who do not. How do we know that it would be better to counter the effects of this bias rather than to respect it as a legitimate form of loyalty? The most plausible ground is the conscious and rational one that race is irrelevant to the badness of someone's suffering, so these differential feelings, however natural, are a poor guide to how we should treat people. But reason is not Brooks's thing: he prefers to quote a little Sunday school hymn about how Jesus loves the little children, "Be they yellow, black or white/they are precious in his sight." This is an easy case, but harder ones also demand more reflection than he has time for.

But then Nagel never explains exactly how purely rational principles resolve moral conflicts. (I recognize, of course, that a short book review doesn't allow for much elaboration.) He doesn't respond to some of the evidence surveyed by Brooks that shows how apparently rational human beings--psychopaths, for example--can become moral monsters because they lack the moral emotions that incline them to care for other human beings.

Moreover, Nagel doesn't explain why so many of the Kantian moral philosophers in Nazi Germany joined the Nazi Party. They surely had a very good intellectual understanding of the rational principle "that race is irrelevant to the badness of someone's suffering." But, apparently, their philosophical rationalism could not overcome the appeal of Nazi morality.

I will be writing some future posts on Brooks's book.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, and here.

The New Yorker has published an excerpt from Brooks's book.

There is a web video of a "TED Talk" by Brooks on why reason cannot be separated from emotion.