Darwinian Storytelling and the Declaration of Independence: A Response to Marlene Sokolon

Marlene Sokolon (Concordia University, Montreal) has written a fascinating paper on the evolution of storytelling about origins for our panel on "Darwin and the Declaration of Independence" at the IPSA convention in Australia.

She makes three major claims.

First, Charles Darwin's science is an origin story that uses the literary devices and narrative patterns of storytelling.

Second, Darwin's scientific origin story includes a story about the evolution of storytelling as a human universal.

Third, Darwin's scientific origin story also includes a story about the evolution of political origin stories like that of the Declaration of Independence and the Canadian Constitution Act of 1867.

Storytelling seems to be a uniquely human activity that is universal to all human societies.  But it is hard to explain why human beings tell stories or why they tell the kind of stories they do.  The Literary Darwinists--like Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and Jonathan Gottschall--have tried to explain storytelling as an evolved human trait favored by natural and sexual selection because it somehow enhanced human survival and reproduction in ancestral environments.

As Sokolon indicates, there are at least three explanations of the evolutionary functions of storytelling.  Storytelling could be an evolved capacity for cognitive play, which allows us to learn how to solve social problems in our imagination in a way that makes us more competent in solving real world problems.  Or storytelling could be a way to communicate complex social information in a way that makes it memorable by putting it in the form of a story with emotional weight.  Or storytelling could be a form of "social glue" that binds people into a shared group identity.  Or it could have evolved to serve all three functions.

But if we accept this Darwinian explanation of storytelling, she suggests, then we need to apply it to Darwin's own storytelling in his scientific writing.  After all, Darwin's scientific theory of evolution is an origin story that explains why we are here using the poetic techniques of storytelling such as dramatic plots, metaphor, and analogy.

Darwin's most prominent metaphor is the very idea of "natural selection," which personifies Nature as a conscious agent that "selects" some organic traits as better than others.  Darwin was criticized for this, and he responded by admitting that in the literal sense "natural selection is a false term," but still it is useful as a metaphorical expression that clearly and vividly conveys the idea of the evolutionary process.  I have written about this in a previous post on the meaning of the phrase "survival of the fittest."

Sokolon observes that while it has become common to separate science from storytelling, "the scientific writing of Darwin's account of the origin of species employs and merges the function of storytelling with his empirical description."  She is certainly right about this.  This evolutionary storytelling that began with Darwin has become even clearer in recent years in the "evolutionary epic" told by people like Edward O. Wilson and the "scientific origin story" told by proponents of Big History like David Christian.

But I do wonder what Sokolon means by the "merging" of storytelling and science.  Does this mean that science becomes indistinguishable from mythic fiction, so that science can no longer be grounded in empirical truth?  As I have indicated in another post, Ian Hesketh makes this claim.  He quotes approvingly from Hayden White: "No one and nothing lives a story."  In other words, every story that we tell is a human fictional creation that has no factual truth, because our lived experience of reality is never a story.  We tell ourselves stories to escape from the messy reality of our lives.  Does Sokolon agree with this?  Or does she believe that some scientific stories--like the story of evolution--can be supported with factual evidence?

Sokolon's Darwinian account of political origin stories raises similar questions about whether such stories are always so purely fictional that they cannot be judged as factually true or false.

Sokolon shows how Darwin's evolutionary explanation of the "moral sense" in The Descent of Man (2nd ed., chapter 4, pp. 120-151 in the Penguin Classics edition) can explain the evolution of political origin stories like the Declaration of Independence.

Darwin sees the evolution of the moral sense as moving through five steps (121-22, 130, 155-58).  First, the social instincts of animals lead them to feel some sympathy with other individuals of their species, so that they will want to help one another, although this sympathy and mutual aid will extend not to all individuals of the species but only to those of the same group.  Second, as the mental faculties became highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be passing through the brain of each individual, so the individual might feel regret at  having yielded to some momentarily strong desire, such as hunger, while leaving some enduring social instinct unsatisfied.  Third, once humans had acquired the power of language, "the wishes of the community could be expressed," so that "the common opinion how each member ought to act for the public good, would naturally become in a paramount degree the guide to action," and consequently sympathy would support a high regard for public opinion--for the approbation or disapprobation of our fellow group members--as expressed in language.  Fourth, this sympathetic concern for the opinions of the community would be greatly strengthened in each individual by habit.  Finally, evolution by group selection in war will favor a high standard of tribal morality.  Darwin explains:

"It must not be forgotten  that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.  A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.  At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase" (157-58).

This tribal morality will cultivate a "sense of glory"--a love of praise and a dread of blame--that will motivate individuals to sacrifice and even risk their lives for the good of the tribe, when there is glory to be attained from this.

Group selection has been controversial among evolutionary theorists today (Okasha 2014).  But some believe that there are good reasons--both empirical and theoretical--for thinking that Darwin was right about group selection in war promoting a tribal morality (Bowles 2009; Bowles & Gintis 2011; Sober and Wilson 1998).

But then, as Sokolon indicates, the problem here is how to explain the expansion of our group identity beyond the small bands and tribes of our ancient evolutionary ancestors to encompass a large modern nation with a great multitude of individuals who cannot be bound together by ties of familial kinship or personal acquaintance.  Darwin suggests:

"As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the member of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.  This point being once reached, there4 is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.  If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures.  sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.  It is apparently unfelt by savages, except toward their pets.  How little the old Romans knew of it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions.  The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas.  This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.  As soon as this virtue is honoured and practiced by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion" (147).

The public opinion that binds the members of the same community into a nation and then later expands to include potentially all of humanity and even all sentient beings is "expressed at first orally, but later by writing" (146).  The written document of the Declaration of Independence can be seen as an expression of American public opinion--or as Jefferson said, "an expression of the American mind" (letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, p. 1501)--that also appeals to "the opinions of mankind."

Sokolon notes that Darwin's reference to how "reason" is needed to teach individuals that they ought to extend their social attachments to the people of their nation suggests that this is more an artificial contrivance of the human mind and less instinctively natural than tribal membership.  Moreover, she argues, the reasoning in the Declaration of Independence is not just a statement of rational principles ("We hold these truths to be self-evident") but also the telling of a political origin story.  It's a dramatic story of heroic patriots pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in a revolutionary struggle against tyranny to vindicate the natural right of the American people to live in freedom.

It's not clear, however, Sokolon suggests, that this is a true story.  They say they are fighting for the natural equality of rights for all men, and yet they are silent about American slavery (except for a passage written by Jefferson condemning the British slave trade that was cut out of the final document).  They also refer to the "merciless Indian savages," as if to imply that these aboriginal Americans are not really part of the American community.  They invoke the right of "one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," and yet they are silent about the huge number of American Loyalists who did not consent to dissolving the bands with Great Britain.  They also refer to "the thirteen United States of America" as "free and independent states," without explaining how these independent sovereign states can be united into "one people."

One might also question whether the "self-evident" truths of the second sentence really are truths.  Michael Zuckert speaks for many readers of the second sentence of the Declaration when he says that the implied history of politics in this sentence is not a "literal history of human politics," but is rather a moral history."  "It is in important senses a self-conscious fiction that presents moral and rational truths about politics but not the literal truth about history" (Zuckert 2002, 230).  Would Sokolon say, yes, of course, it's a fictional work of story-telling?  My argument, however, is that this history of the state of nature, the formation of government by consent, and the overthrow of tyrannical government can be confirmed as a literally true account of the evolutionary history of politics.  Would she say that I am wrong about this?

What she says in comparing the Declaration with political storytelling in Athens and Canada suggests that political origin stories can never be literally true.  Once human beings moved beyond the small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers and entered large communities, she says, they needed origin stories to unite a multitude of individuals into these huge communities.  This is what Plato meant in The Republic in teaching the need for a "noble lie" about the origin of a large community: "the myth of the metals . . . creates artificial unity in the city by teaching citizens that they are all brothers born of the earth."  Sokolon thinks that fifth century Athens shows that Plato was right about this, because the Athenians consciously reworked their own origin myths through tragedy--such as in the reworking of the story of Theseus so that he became a founder of Athenian democracy uniting an extended Attic territory.

In Canada, Sokolon sees a political origin story very different from both the Athenian story and the Declaration of Independence.  The Canadian story of achieving independence from British rule in 1867 "is one of negotiation, conventions, and political campaigns, which relies on the nobility of political persuasion, rather than violence in its founding.  However, in comparison to a story with a plot of characters struggling to overcome an oppressive tyrant, it has less effective panache as an origin story."

The Canadian Constitution Act of 1867 declares that the three original provinces--New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Province of Canada (later to become Ontario and Quebec)--"desire to be federally united under one Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom."  But this is not described as a union of "one people."  Rather than "one people," the Dominion was recognized as formed by "two founding nations"--British and French.--as confirmed by the use of two languages--English and French.  This has created a tension between two nations in one united Canada.

Sokolon sees this "two founding nations" origin story being challenged by a revised origin story of "multiculturalism" after the opening of immigration in the 1960s.  More recently, both stories have been challenged by the claim that the Canadian origin story is a "living lie" insofar as it does not recognize the unique contribution of the aboriginal communities.

Sokolon recognizes that another problem for all of these political origin stories about the founding of diverse nations is indicated by Darwin's claim that national identity is only an "artificial barrier" to extending human sympathy "to all men of all races," and perhaps even to "all sentient creatures."  Is Darwin arguing for a human origin story to sustain a global morality of humanitarianism and human rights?  Won't the national origin stories always be in some tension with the humanitarian or cosmopolitan origin stories?  This is what some evolutionary theorists have called "parochial altruism": our altruistic devotion to our in-group puts us into xenophobic competition with out-groups (Choi & Bowles 2007).  This is manifest in the nativist nationalism of populist leaders like Donald Trump who scorn the liberal globalism of free trade, open borders, and international human rights as a threat to national interests.

As Sokolon suggests, the Darwinian view of evolved sociality and sympathy might confirm the Aristotelian view of philanthropia--while our friendly feeling is naturally strongest for kin and for those close to us, it can be extended, although in less intense form, to all of humanity.  If so, then the Darwinian origin story could promote a tense combination of parochial attachment and humanitarian concern.  This combination of parochialism and humanitarianism is manifest in the Declaration's affirmation of the American people's separate identity combined with a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" and regarding all of mankind as "enemies in war, in peace friends."

This means that pure altruism--selfless, disinterested, and universal love--is impossible, because love of others is always an extension of self-love.  I have written a post on this.


REFERENCES

Bowles, Samuel. 2009. "Did Warfare among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherer Groups Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behavior?"  Science 324: 1293-1298.

Bowles, Samuel, & Herbert Gintis. 2011. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Choi, Jung-Kyoo, & Samuel Bowles. 2007. "The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War." Science 318:636-640.

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man, 2nd ed., eds. James Moore & Adrian Desmond. London: Penguin Books.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1984. Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson. New York: Library of America.

Okasha, Samir. 2014. "Units and Levels of Selection." In The Princeton Guide to Evolution, ed. Jonathan B. Losos, 200-205. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sober, Elliott, & David Sloan Wilson. 1998.  Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zuckert, Michael. 2002. Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,

Darwin and the Declaration of Independence in Australia

In two weeks, I will be leaving for a trip to Australia and New Zealand.  My first stop will be Brisbane, where I will be on a panel on "Darwin and the Declaration of Independence," at the convention of the International Political Science Association.  The other members of the panel are Kenneth Blanchard (Northern State University), Jason Jividen (Saint Vincent College), and Marlene Sokolon (Concordia University, Montreal).

My paper for the panel is "The Darwinian Science of the Declaration of Independence."  This paper includes a lot of material from posts on this blog.  Here's a few excerpts from the Introduction, followed by the Table of Contents.

Political science could become a true science by becoming a biopolitical science of political animals.  This science would be both Aristotelian and Darwinian.  It would be Aristotelian in fulfilling Aristotle's original understanding of political science as the biological study of the political life of human beings and other political animals.  It would be Darwinian in employing Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory as well as modern advances in Darwinian biology to explain political behavior as shaped by genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and individual judgment.

The fundamental framework for biopolitical science is the theoretical analysis of political behavior as conforming to a nested hierarchy of three levels of evolutionary deep history--the universal history of each species of political animals, the cultural history of each group of political animals within the species, and the individual history of animals within the group.  So, for example, Jane Goodall's study of the chimpanzees of Gombe in Tanzania and Frans de Waal's study of the chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands show these three levels of chimpanzee political science.  They see some patterns of chimpanzee political behavior that have evolved as part of the universal history of the species--such as male dominance hierarchies--which will arise in all chimpanzee groups.  But they also see distinctive social traditions in each group of chimpanzees that have arisen in their cultural history--such as patterns of making and using tools among the Gombe chimps not seen among the Arnhem chimps.  And they also see unique individuals in each group with individually distinct personalities and styles of behavior arising from inborn temperament and a life history of social experiences.

Similarly, for a biopolitical science of human politics, we must understand the universal history of the human species, the cultural history of human groups within the species, and the individual history of human agents within the groups.  To illustrate how this might be done, I have shown how a biopolitical science could deepen our understanding of one of the crucial turns in American political history--Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863.  We can understand this as an event in the natural history of cooperation in the human species, in the cultural history of slavery in America, and in the individual history of Lincoln as a political actor in the American Civil War.

Now, in this paper, I will illustrate how this same Darwinian biopolitical framework applies to the study of the Declaration of Independence as an event in the natural history of human politics, in the cultural history of the American political founding, and in the individual history of Thomas Jefferson and the others who signed the Declaration.

This must seem strange to many people, because it is often claimed that a Darwinian science of human evolution denies the political theory of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence by denying the Declaration's appeal to God as the Creator who has endowed human beings with unalienable rights.  Darwin seemed to deny this when he wrote: "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity, more humble, and I believe true, to consider him created from animals."  If human beings have been "created from animals," it might seem that they have not been specially created by God in His image and thus endowed with that moral dignity that sets them apart from other animals.  I will have to answer this objection that the Darwinian denial of the creationist political theology of the Declaration of Independence is a general denial of the idea of natural human rights.

I will organize my Darwinian analysis of the Declaration into four sections that correspond to the four parts of the document.  The first part is the first sentence, which states the purpose of the document--to show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" by making an argument that justifies the American colonists in declaring their independence from Great Britain.  The second part of the Declaration is the famous statement of those truths held to be self-evident that show how the right to revolution is rooted in the universal history of the human species, and this assertion of the natural right to revolution can be understood as the major premise of the Declaration's syllogism.

The third part of the document is the long list of grievances against the King that have arisen in the cultural history of the American colonists under British rule, and this claim that the "history of repeated injuries and usurpation" shows a design to establish tyranny over the Americans can be understood as the minor premise in the Declaration's syllogism.

Finally, the fourth part of the document is the statement of the 56 individual signatories--"We, therefore, the representatives of the United States"--who exercise their individual judgment in drawing the conclusion of the syllogism: "that these colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states."

Thus, the justifying argument promised in the first sentence is laid out in the document as a syllogism:

Major premise:  The natural history of humanity shows that human beings have a natural right to overthrow tyrannical governments.

Minor premise:  The cultural history of the American colonies shows that the British King intends to exercise tyranny over the colonies.

Conclusion:  The 56 individuals signing the Declaration can exercise their prudential judgment, acting as representatives of the American people, to affirm the conclusion that the American colonies have a right to revolt in separating from British rule.

The structure of this syllogism corresponds to the three levels of deep evolutionary history in Darwinian biopolitical science: the natural history of the political species, the cultural history of a political group within the species, and the individual history of political agents within the group.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1  INTRODUCTION

2  THE OPINIONS OF MANKIND
    2.1  Symbolic Evolution
    2.2  Nature's God

3  THE UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE RIGHT TO REVOLUTION
    3.1  The State of Nature
           3.1.1  The Equal Liberty of Hunter-Gatherers
           3.1.2  Self-Ownership
           3.1.3  The Natural Law of Reputation and Punishment
           3.1.4  War and Peace in the State of Nature
    3.2  Governments Instituted by Consent of the Governed
    3.3  Revolution
           3.3.1  The History of Revolutionary Resistance
           3.3.2  Might Makes Right

4  THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE BRITISH KING'S INJURIES AND USURPATIONS
     4.1  Animal Culture
     4.2  The Factual Indictment
     4.3  Slavery

5  THE INDIVIDUAL HISTORY OF POLITICAL JUDGMENTS BY 56 SIGNERS
     5.1  Animal Personalities and Political Ambition
     5.2  The Love of Fame Among the Founding Brothers

6  CONCLUSION

Jefferson's Biological Science of Equality, Race, and Slavery

I have argued that Thomas Jefferson's affirmation of human equality of natural rights and his condemnation of slavery as a violation of those natural rights can be confirmed by Darwinian biological science.  My reasoning for this is elaborated in my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, and some of what I will write here comes from that chapter.

A common objection to my argument is that it commits the naturalistic fallacy by mistakenly trying to derive moral values from scientific facts.  Some people see Jefferson himself committing the same fallacy in assuming that the moral principle of human equality could be studied by science as a biological fact, which creates a contradiction in Jefferson's writings insofar as his natural science of racial inequality contradicts his moral teaching about human equality as a "self-evident truth."  This position has been argued, for example, by Daniel Boorstin (1948) and Jean Yarbrough (1991).

Against this position, I have contended that there is no naturalistic fallacy in seeing natural moral judgment as based on hypothetical imperatives that have a "given/if/then" structure: Given what we know about the nature of human beings and the world in which they live, if we want to pursue happiness while living in society with each other, then we ought to adopt a social structure that conforms to human nature in promoting human happiness in society.  So, for example, given what we know about human vulnerability and human propensities to violent aggression, if we want to pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity in our society, then we ought to have laws against murder, rape, assault, and theft.  Consequently, the laws against murder, rape, assault, and theft are natural moral laws.  I have elaborated this thought in some posts here, here, and here.

The same sort of reasoning is implicit in Jefferson's writings about equality, race, and slavery.  Although readers of the Declaration of Independence have often criticized it for not condemning racial slavery as violating the "self-evident" truths that "all men are created equal," and endowed by their creator with natural rights, Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration actually contained a passage condemning the King for supporting the British slave trade:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another" (Jefferson 1984, 22). 

Jefferson reports that this clause was struck out because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

Notice that slaves are identified as "men," and thus entitled to the "rights of life and liberty" that belong to all men.  Notice also the reference to the "market where MEN should be bought & sold."  Since female as well as male slaves were sold on the market, this must imply that "men" is being used in a generic sense to include women as well as men.  If so, then the affirmation in the Declaration that "all men are created equal" must include slaves and women.

Enslaving human beings is said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  This appeal to human nature as the moral standard for natural rights appears often in Jefferson's writings, where one repeatedly finds language about "the rights of human nature" and the abolition of slavery as "a complete emancipation of human nature" (1972, 87; 1984, 116).

But since human nature shows great variation across human individuals and human racial groups, we might wonder whether that natural human variation denies any idea of natural human equality.  If some individuals and some races are naturally superior to others in their physical and mental capacities, then why doesn't that natural superiority give them a natural right to rule over those that are inferior?  If there really are natural slaves and natural masters, then why isn't there a natural law of slavery as being best both for the slaves and for the masters?

Beginning a few years after Jefferson's death in 1826, some proslavery Southerners began to argue that far from being a "cruel war against human nature itself," slavery could be according to nature if a naturally superior race enslaved a naturally inferior race, and such natural slavery could be a "positive good" for both slaves and masters.  After all, Aristotle had argued for there being natural slaves, and modern biological science seems to have confirmed that some races are naturally fitted for being enslaved, just as some ants naturally enslave other ants (Calhoun 1992, 467-69, 473-76; Cobb 1999, 8-52).

In his famous "Cornerstone Speech" of 1861, Alexander Stephens, the newly appointed Vice President of the Confederacy, rejected Jefferson's principle of natural equality--including the equality of races--as an error that had been refuted by modern science.  He declared that the Confederacy had a better foundation:

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition.  This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.  This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science" (Stephens 2003, 91).

Although Stephens thought this new science of racial inequality denied Jefferson's teaching of equality, some of the proslavery thinkers found support for their position in some of Jefferson's writings--particularly Query 14 of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, where he studies the races as "subjects of natural history" and concludes with the "suspicion" that the blacks are "inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."  A few years ago, when Paul Finkelman edited a collection of documents representing "proslavery thought in the Old South," he began his collection with some passages from Query 14 of the Notes on Virginia, which he described as Jefferson's "discussion of slavery in which he set out many of the arguments that Southerners would develop into a full blown proslavery defense in the first half of the nineteenth century" (Finkelman 2003, 47).

This is why Jean Yarbrough criticizes Jefferson for failing to see how his biological science or "natural history" of race in Query 14 of the Notes contradicts the self-evident truths of the Declaration.  She complains that Jefferson should have seen that the self-evident truths of the Declaration depend on axiomatic moral values that are incompatible with, and morally superior to, any scientific understanding of the natural facts of human nature.

Yarbrough says that the Declaration's "self-evident truths are those necessary principles which do not depend upon experience or scientific validation for their existence" (1991, 92).  "For once we know what a man is, i.e., a rational being with the capacity for moral action, it is self-evident that blacks are men.  Any attempt to prove or demonstrate this proposition would negate its self-evident character" (1991, 95).

"Underlying the Declaration's principles is the argument that, despite the evident intellectual, moral, and physical inequalities which Nature and Nature's God have scattered among human beings, all people are equal in the most decisive respect, namely, the possession of certain inalienable rights  For these rights are rooted in certain universal passions, which reason helps each individual to direct and secure.  Thus, no one may justly deprive another of these rights; nor may he rule over another without the other's consent" (1991, 95).

But then when Jefferson expresses  his "suspicion" that blacks are "inferior to whites in the endowments of both the body and the mind," Yarbrough says that "the self-evident moral propositions of the Declaration are seriously undermined" (1991, 98).  Here she contradicts herself.  If the self-evident truths "do not depend upon experience or scientific validation for their existence," then they cannot be undermined by any conclusions someone might infer about racial differences from experience or scientific study.  On the one hand, Yarbrough argues that the moral values of human equality of rights are axiomatic or necessary truths that have nothing to do with the empirical facts of human nature; and so that blacks are equal in their manhood is self-evident, because they satisfy the definition of manhood as having rationality with the capacity for moral action.  On the other hand, Yarbrough worries that any empirical claim that blacks are inferior in their capacities for reason and morality undermines the principle of human equality, because "scientific proof that blacks as a race are by nature intellectually inferior to whites might render their membership in the human community precarious" (1991, 103).

In The Federalist (number 31), Alexander Hamilton speaks about the self-evident axioms of Euclidean geometry--that "the whole is greater than its parts; things equal to the same are equal to one another; two straight lines cannot enclose a space; and all right angles are equal to each other."  So, that "all men are created equal" might be axiomatically true, in the sense that all men are equally men--a tautological truth.  Or we might say that men equal in their membership in the human species are equal to one another.

But then sorting animals into their species is an empirical question.  So, for example, following Linnaeus, Jefferson has to decide what traits separate the human species from the orangutans, who are close relatives of human beings.  If the distinctly human traits are rationality and moral emotions, then it's an empirical matter to identify the minimal levels of intellectual and moral capacity required for membership in the human species as the natural ground for human equality.

Due to their capacities for moral judgment and moral passions, human beings cannot properly be treated as domesticated animals or natural slaves adapted by their nature to serve their master's will, because insofar as human beings demand reciprocity in their social relations, they will never become mere extensions of a master's will.  Unlike domesticated animals, human slaves will judge the exploitative character of their enslavement, and their moral passions of resentment will motivate them to resist such exploitation.  Natural equality does not mean natural identity of capacities or achievements.  Natural human equality requires only an equality in those minimal moral dispositions that incline human beings to resist exploitation by other human beings and to demand a social order based on reciprocal and mutually beneficial exchange.

As the most dramatic expression of that moral resistance to exploitation, human slaves will run away from their masters or engage in violent insurrections.  One can see this in the history of the first slave societies, such as ancient Mesopotamia, which has been the subject of a previous post.

Jefferson saw this, because he indicated that even if it were shown that blacks were naturally inferior in the "endowments of the head," they were clearly well endowed in "the heart"--that is to say, in that "moral sense" of right and wrong that is as much a part of human nature as tasting and feeling (1972, 93, 143).  Although they are unequal in many respects, blacks are equal to whites in their moral sense, and thereby equal in their moral claim to their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Wills 1978, 218-28).

It was commonly observed, however, that black slaves were utterly shameless in stealing from their masters; and many masters confessed that they took it for granted that a large portion of a plantation's production would be lost to theft by their slaves (Genovese 1976, 599-609).  Many slaveholders took this as evidence that the blacks lacked any sense of morality.  And yet Jefferson argued just the opposite:

"That disposition to theft with which they have been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense.  The man, in whose favor no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favor of others.  When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right: that, without this, they are mesre arbitgrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience; and it is a problem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious precepts against the violation of propert y were not framed for him as well as his slave?  And whether the slave may not as justifiably take a little from one, who has taken all from him, as he may slay one who would slay him?" (1972, 142)

Jefferson added: "Notwithstanding these considerations, which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity" (1972, 142-43).

Far from showing their lack of a moral sense, slaves show the clarity of their moral judgment in taking the goods of their masters.  The slaveholders themselves recognizes that the laws of property, like any social norms that claim moral sanction, must allow "reciprocation of right."  Laws that deny reciprocity by promoting the interests of one group at the expense of another are grounded in force, not right.  The fundamental purpose of the laws of property is to enforce the rights and duties of reciprocal exchange.  Therefore, since the master deprives the slave of all property--even his self-ownership--the slave is justified by the moral logic of reciprocity in taking the master 's property whenever he can.

The precise moral logic of the slaves was evident in the fact that they distinguished between "taking" goods  from the master, which was permissible, and "stealing" goods from other slaves, which was prohibited.  They recognized the importance of respecting property rights among themselves as a condition of social order founded on reciprocity.  Yet they reasoned that if slaves were the absolute property of the master, as required by the logic of slavery, then slaves could not be properly said to "steal" from their masters.  After all, a slave who eats some of his master's corn is only transforming the master's property from one form to another, just as when a slave feeds the master's corn to the master's chickens (Genovese 1976, 602).

Thus, again, the slaves expose the contradiction of slavery in treating the slave as a mere extension of the master's will, which denies the humanity of the slave and thus also denies that the slave can have any moral duties towards the master.  The slaves show that they are not the inferior beings they are supposed to be; they do this by acting according to the principle of reciprocity as the foundation of human social life in which no human being can be the mere extension of another's will.

Although Jefferson correctly recognizes this as an expression of the human moral sense, he is mistaken, I believe, in regarding this as purely an act of the "heart" rather than the "head."  Certainly, the moral principle of reciprocity does rest upon passions or sentiments such as anger, indignation, and gratitude.  But still, reason prompts and directs those passions.  The subtle logic of the slaves in distinguishing "taking" from masters and "stealing" from other slaves, for example, manifests an intellectual capacity for moral judgment that is uniquely human.  So although all blacks do not have to be absolutely equal to all whites in their rational faculties to be equal in their moral sense, blacks must at least have that minimal ability for rationally judging principles such as reciprocity and for feeling the moral sentiments that enforce those principles.

If there were human beings--perhaps an entire race--that lacked that minimal level of rational and emotional capacity, so that they could not grasp the moral logic of principles like reciprocity, such people would be natural slaves.  Jefferson's argument seems to be that, with the possible exception of those who suffer from some abnormal mental disorder, all human beings have the minimal emotional and intellectual capacities that support a human moral sense.  Human beings recognize the exploitation in slavery as violating the moral principle of reciprocity, and in response to such exploitation, they feel moral passions such as anger and shame.

Jefferson repeated this thought in the last letter he wrote, only a few days before his death on July 4th, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Speaking of the Declaration, he wrote:

"May it be to the world, what believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings land security of self-government.  That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.  The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God" (1984, 1517).

Using an image from Algernon Sydney's Discourses Concerning Government (1990, 511), Jefferson here indicates that human beings are not like those few species of animals that are naturally fitted for being domesticated by human beings for serving their human masters.  Although "monkish ignorance and superstition" have for long persuaded human beings that the great multitude of people are naturally born to serve a small ruling class, whose rule is favored "by the grace of God," now "the light of science" is opening the eyes of all to the scientific truth that human beings are not born to live as domesticated animals or natural slaves.

As already indicated, however, there was a long tradition of scientific racism in the nineteenth century that seemed to show that the "light of science" was actually proslavery.  Scientists such as Samuel Morton and Josiah Nott argued that measurements of the cranial sizes of human skulls showed that the white race had the largest brains of any racial group, thus explaining the superior intellectual and moral capacities of the white race.  Nott used this as evidence that the Caucasian and Negro races were actually two separate species (Morton 1839, 1844; Nott 1981).

Contrary to what is asserted by modern scholars like Boorstin and Yarbrough, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass did not believe that the moral values of human equality could be held to be true without any grounding in the scientific facts of human nature, because they recognized that if the racial science of Morton and Nott was valid, the argument against slavery would be weakened if not completely refuted.  Fundamental to the critique of slavery, Douglass believed, is the premise that "human rights stand upon a common basis . . . because all mankind have the same wants, arising out of a common nature."  This premise would be denied by the scientific claim that blacks and whites belong to separate species of unequal abilities.  Douglass observed: "Let it be once granted that the human race are of multitudinous origin, naturally different in their moral, physical, and intellectual capacities, and at once you make plausible a demand for classes, grades, and conditions, for different methods of culture, different moral, political, and religious institutions, and a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary institution" (1955, 2:295, 2:307).

Charles Darwin's evolutionary science confirmed Douglass's affirmation of the unity of the human species and Jefferson's account of the universal moral sense in a way that refuted the claims of scientific racism supporting slavery.  Adrian Desmond and James Moore have shown how Darwin's opposition to slavery influenced much of his thinking about human evolution in Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (2009).  I have written a post on their book.


REFERENCES

Boorstin, Daniel. 1948. The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Henry Holt.

Calhoun, John C. 1992. Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun. Ed. Ross M. Lence.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Cobb, Thomas R. R. 1999. An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America. Introduction by Paul Finkelman. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Douglass, Frederick. 1955. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. 5 vols. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: International Publishers.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1972. Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1984. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: The Library of America.

Morton, Samuel G. 1839. Crania Americana. Philadelphia: John Pennington.

Morton, Samuel G. 1844. Crania Aegyptian. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 9:93-159.

Stephens, Alexander. 2003. "The Cornerstone Speech, 1861." In Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents. Ed. Paul Finkelman. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

Sidney, Algernon. 1990. Discourses Concerning Government. Ed. Thomas G. West. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.

Wills, Garry. 1978. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. New York: Doubleday.

Yarbrough, Jean. 1991. "Race and the Moral Foundation of the American Republic: Another Look at the Declaration and the Notes on Virginia." Journal of Politics 53: 90-105.

Jefferson, Hemings, and the Evolution of Racial Mixing

"A Philosophic Cock," 1804.  A Satirical Cartoon in a Federalist Newspaper of Jefferson's Relationship with Sally Hemings

A week ago, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation opened a new exhibit at Jefferson's Monticello plantation on Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave who bore as many as six of his children over the last 40 years of his life.  The New York Times has a good article on this and also a good essay by Annette Gordon-Reed, who is one of the historians responsible for shifting scholarly opinion towards accepting Jefferson's fathering of Hemings' children.

That the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, who affirmed natural human equality and who denounced slavery as a violation of human nature, could not only own black slaves but also exploit them for his sexual gratification forces us to think about the human nature of slavery and the evolution of racial mixing.

Moreover, explaining the moral and political history of the Jefferson and Hemings relationship can illustrate the biopolitical science of political animals as moving through three levels of deep history--the universal history of the species, the cultural history of the group, and the individual history of animals within the group

In 1802, James Callender, a journalist with a grudge against Jefferson, published an article in a Richmond newspaper claiming that it was widely known in the neighborhood of Charlottesville that Jefferson had fathered several children with a slave woman named "Sally," and that these children bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson.  The Federalist opponents of Jefferson made this an issue in the presidential election of 1804.  Jefferson said nothing in public about this charge.  But some of his friends--including James Madison--dismissed it as preposterous, because it was contrary to the moral character that he had always displayed.

In 1853, however, Jefferson's friend John Hartwell Cocke wrote in his diary about "Mr. Jefferson's notorious example" as illustrating the shameful practice of slaveowners in Virginia fathering children with their slaves.

In the 1850s, Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph spoke with the historian Henry S. Randall, telling him that Sally Hemings's children really did resemble his grandfather so closely that it was clear that the children had been fathered by someone in Jefferson's family.  But Randolph insisted that the father was Peter Carr, one of the sons of Jefferson's sister, who was notorious for his sexual connection with Sally Hemings.

In 1873, Sally Hemings's son Madison was interviewed by the editor of the Pike County Republican newspaper in Ohio.  He told the story of his ancestry as related to him by his mother.  He said that his grandmother (Elizabeth Hemings) had been fathered by an English sea captain, who had impregnated an African slave woman.  Elizabeth was owned by Virginian John Wayles, who took her as his concubine after the death of his wife.  He fathered Elizabeth's six children, one of whom was Sally Hemings.  One of Wayles' children by his wife was Martha, Thomas Jefferson's wife.  When Wayles died, Martha inherited his land and his slaves, including Sally Hemings, who was Martha's half-sister.

Martha died in 1782, and Jefferson promised her on her death bed that he would never remarry.  She had had six children, but only two daughters survived into adulthood--Martha and Maria.

In 1784, Jefferson was appointed a minister plenipotentiary to join John Adams and Benjamin Franklin in Europe to negotiate treaties.  In 1785, he was appointed to succeed Franklin as minister to France.  While in Paris, he was known for his flirtatious dalliances with married women, particularly Maria Cosway.

In 1787, the fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings accompanied the nine-year-old Maria Jefferson to Paris.  According to the accounts of slaves on the plantation and Jefferson's grandson, Sally was nearly white in appearance and so beautiful that she was known as "Dashing Sally."  According to Madison Hemmings's report, Sally in Paris became "Mr. Jefferson's concubine."  At this time, "concubine" was the term for a woman in an enduring sexual liaison with a man without being legally married to him.

In 1789, Jefferson was called back to the United States to become Secretary of State in President Washington's first administration.  Madison said that when Jefferson asked Sally to return home with him, she demurred, because she had learned enough French to know that French law would permit her to be free if she remained in France, while in Virginia she would be a slave.  Jefferson promised that if she returned with him, he would give her special privileges for the rest of her life, and her children would be freed at the age of 21.  Hemings trusted him to keep his word.  Jefferson was 46 years old.  Hemings was 16.

And, indeed, according to what Madison called "the treaty" between his mother and Jefferson, all four of the Hemings children who lived to adulthood--three sons (Beverly, Madison, and Eston) and one daughter (Harriet)--became free at adulthood.  All of the children worked in Jefferson's home and were free from any field work.  All of them married and raised children.  Beverly became identified as a white man, and he married a white woman.  Harriet became identified as a white woman and married a white man.  Eston lived as a white man who married a black woman.  Madison remained in the black community, and he married a fair skinned black woman.  After Jefferson's death in 1826, his slaves were sold, but Sally left the plantation and became a free woman, living with two of her children until her death in 1835.

It is not clear whether Hemings's sexual submission to Jefferson was romantic or coerced or perhaps some complex mixture of both.  At the new Monticello exhibit, some of the written displays use the word "rape?" with a question mark to convey this uncertainty about the character of their sexual relationship.

A few months after Madison Hemings's interview in 1873 with the Pike County Republican, Israel Jefferson, a former slave of Jefferson's and a friend of Hemings, gave his own interview to that newspaper confirming Hemings's story about his mother being Jefferson's concubine.

Until recently, however, historians have generally dismissed as unreliable all of the reports of Jefferson fathering children by Hemings.  Many historians have accepted the claim of Thomas Jefferson Randolph that the resemblance of Hemings's children to Jefferson could be explained by their being fathered by one of the Carr brothers.  Historians could not believe that a man with the moral character of Thomas Jefferson could have engaged in such reprehensible conduct in secret for almost 40 years.

In 1968, Winthrop Jordan, in his book White Over Black, noted that Jefferson's plantation account books showed that Jefferson had been at Monticello at every time when Sally Hemings conceived a child (Jordan 1968, 1999).  Later, it was shown that Hemings tended to get pregnant within one month after Jefferson's arrival at Monticello (Neiman 2000).

In 1974, Fawn Brodie published her best-selling popular book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, which argued for a Freudian explanation of Jefferson's sexual activity with Hemings.  But some of Brodie's reasoning turned on speculative scenarios with little supporting evidence.

Finally, in 1997, the intellectual tide among historians began to turn towards accepting the story of Hemings as Jefferson's concubine because of the influence of Annette Gordon-Reed's book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.  A historian with a law degree, she conceded that there was no "definitive proof" for this conclusion, but then she presented a carefully crafted legal brief claiming that the preponderance of the evidence favored it.

She summarized the evidence as eight items supporting the assertion that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children .

1. Madison Hemings Claim to Be the Son of Thomas Jefferson.
Against the argument of historians that the abolitionist editor of the Pike County Republican (S. F. Wetmore) prompted Madison Hemings in 1873 to falsely claim to be the son of Jefferson, Gordon-Reed pointed out that as early as the 1840s there were newspaper reports about Madison and his brother Eston being the children of Jefferson.  Moreover, much of what Madison Hemings said in his interview with Wetmore has been confirmed by and fits with other evidence.

2. Israel Jefferson's Corroboration of Madison Hemings's Statement.

3. John Hartwell Cocke's Statement That Jefferson Had a Slave Mistress.
John Hartwell Cocke served with Jefferson on the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia.  Cocke saw Jefferson's taking a slave concubine as manifesting an unwritten social code of conduct among slaveholders, who informally agreed that this practice would not damage one's public reputation as long as the slave master did not live openly with his slave concubines.  Historians have confirmed that this was in fact a widespread cultural norm (Morgan 1999; Rothman 1999).

4. James Callender's Assertion Corroborating Madison Hemings's Statement.

5. Hemings's Conceptions and Jefferson's Proximity.
This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence--that Hemings never conceived a child when Jefferson was not in residence at Monticello, although he was often away from Monticello for six to eight months at a time.  It is hard to understand how the Carr brothers failed to father any children during these long periods when Jefferson was absent from Monticello.

6. The Resemblance of Sally Hemings's Children to Thomas Jefferson..
Remarkably, while Thomas Jefferson Randolph was trying to deny Thomas Jefferson's paternity of Hemings's children, he admitted that they all looked much like him.  If we accept this, then it is unlikely that Hemings's children were fathered by any of the white men who visited Monticello, because Randolph's claims about resemblance to Jefferson reduced the possible fathers to three men: Thomas Jefferson, Peter Carr, and Samuel Carr.

7. The Treatment of Sally Hemings's Children.
The best evidence for Madison Hemmings's report of a "treaty" that Sally Hemings negotiated with Jefferson as her condition for agreeing to become his concubine in Virginia is what happened to her children.  All four of her children were allowed to leave Monticello as free adults after they turned 21.  Jefferson freed no other slave in this way.  The very few that he freed were older men that had performed special services for him.  Harriet Hemings was the only female that he ever freed.  The treatment of the Hemings's children was also special in that they were all assigned private baby-sitters.  The records also show that all three of Hemings's sons were taught to play the violin--the instrument favored by Jefferson himself.

8. The Freeing of Sally Hemings.
After the death of Jefferson, his slaves were sold, but Sally Hemings was allowed to go free and to live with her sons Madison and Eston.  Jefferson's will did not specify this, which is understandable if he did not want to provide public written evidence for his special treatment of her.

The ninth piece of evidence--and perhaps the most dramatic form of evidence--came a year after the publication of Gordon-Reed's book.  In 1998, a genetic analysis published in Nature showed that there was a DNA match on the Y chromosome between a living male-line descendent of Eston Hemings and male-line descendants of Field Jefferson, a paternal uncle of Thomas Jefferson (Foster et al. 1998; Foster et al. 1999; Lander and Ellis 1998).  The researchers had to look at the male-line descendants of Field Jefferson, because Thomas Jefferson had no sons who lived to adulthood, and thus he left no male descendants.

Most  of the Y chromosome is passed intact from father to son.  But there are small regions of DNA that vary among individuals, so that Y chromosomes can be distinguished by the haplotype (the set of specific variants) that they carry.  The authors of this study found a rare haplotype in the Y chromosome of the descendants of Jefferson's paternal grandfather that matched that of Eston Hemings's descendant.

This was widely reported as conclusive proof that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children.  But as the authors of the report indicated, they could not completely rule out the possibility that some male-line descendant of Field Jefferson other than Thomas Jefferson fathered an ancestor of the presumed male-line descendant of Eston Hemings.  The men of Randolph Jefferson's family could have fathered Sally Hemings's children.  But the researchers believed the historical evidence made this possibility unlikely.

In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation--the owner of Jefferson's home at Monticello--issues a report concluding that Jefferson fathered at least one and perhaps all of Sally Hemings's children.

But then some scholars rejected this as an unfair and unproven assault on the moral reputation of Thomas Jefferson as one of the greatest of America's Founding Fathers.  A group of these scholars formed the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which set up a Scholars Commission of senior scholars to reexamine all the evidence for and against Jefferson's paternity of Hemings's children.  There were 13 members of the Commission: Lance Banning, James Ceaser, Robert H. Ferrell, Charles Kesler, Harvey C. Mansfield, Alf J. Mapp, Jr., David N. Mayer, Forrest McDonald, Paul A. Rahe, Thomas Traut, Robert F. Turner, Walter E. Williams, and Jean Yarbrough.  They issued their report in 2001, and it was published as a book in 2011 (Turner 2011).

The majority of the Scholars Commission--12 of the 13 members--concluded that that the allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children was by no means proven and probably false. The one dissenting member--Paul Rahe--agreed that this allegation was not decisively proven, but he dissented in "believing it somewhat more likely than not that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings."  He was particularly impressed by two lines of evidence--first, the correlation between the beginning of Sally Hemings's pregnancies and Thomas Jefferson's times of residence at Monticello, and, second, the DNA evidence that Eston was fathered by a direct male descendant of Jefferson's grandfather.

How one weighs the evidence in this case, Rahe observed, depends a lot on what one thinks about Jefferson's moral character.  Those scholars who find the story of Jefferson taking Hemings as his slave concubine incredible think this contradicts the moral character that he displayed throughout life. But those like Rahe who see evidence that Jefferson was unusually vain, deceitful, self-deceptive, and hypocritical are more inclined to see the story as credible.

After all, Rahe pointed out, we know for sure that even if Jefferson did not himself abuse his power as slaveholder over Sally Hemings, he allowed one or more members of his extended family to exercise abusive power over Hemings.

"In his private, as in his public, life," Rahe said, "there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self-indulgent about the man" (2011, 352).

I agree with Rahe.

Consider now how any explanation of this Jefferson-Hemings affair must move through the three levels of biopolitical science.  At the level of the universal history of the species, we have to explain the evolved psychology of human nature that supports male dominance hierarchies, the expression of dominance in enslavement, and the resistance of slaves to exploitative mastery.

In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson recognized that slavery was ultimately a "cruel war against human nature itself."  And in the Notes on the State of Virginia, he warned that "the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other," and he saw that "the man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances" (Jefferson 1982, Query XVIII, p. 162).  It appears that Jefferson was not such a prodigy.

At the level of the cultural history of the group, we can explain Jefferson's use of Hemings as his concubine, but without public acknowledgment, as his adoption of an informal social norm that arose in the culture of Virginia's slave society.  But in the Declaration of Independence and in other writings where Jefferson denounced slavery as unjust in violating the principles of natural right, we can see the cultural symbolism of Lockean liberal ideas and how those ideas contradict Jefferson's practice of slaveholding.

Finally, at  the level of the individual history of animals in the group, we have to judge Jefferson's personal character and his individual moral and political judgments.  Before Jefferson left for Europe in 1784, he consistently proposed plans for the gradual emancipation of slaves.  Yet when he returned to the United States in 1789, he continued to declare slavery a great injustice, but he never again proposed any plans for emancipation.  Scholars have wondered how to explain this change of mind.  Did it have something to do with Hemings's concubinage?  And if so, can we condemn him for his hypocrisy and deceit?

Jefferson's hypocrisy is most evident when he warns that if the American slaves are emancipated, they must be expelled from the country so that they are "removed beyond the reach of mixture" (Jefferson 1972, Query XIV, p. 143).  He worried about the "degradation" coming from the "amalgamation" of races (Jefferson 1984, 1345).  Alexander Hamilton criticized Jefferson for these comments, pointing out the high incidence of race mixing in slave societies because of slave masters making concubines of their slaves.


REFERENCES

Brodie, Fawn. 1974. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.  New York: Norton.

Foster, Eugene A., M. A. Jobling, P. G. Taylor, P. Donnelly, P. de Knijff, Rene Mieremet, T. Zerjal, and C. Tyler-Smith. 1998. "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child." Nature 396: 27-28.

Foster, Eugene A., et al. 1999. "The Thomas Jefferson Paternity Case." Nature 397: 32.

Gordon-Reed, Annette. 1997. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Gordon-Reed, Annette. 2008. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.  New York: Norton.

Gordon-Reed, Annette. 2018. "Sally Hemings Takes Center Stage."  The New York Times. June 15.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1972. Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas 1984. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: The Library of America.

Lander, Eric S., and Joseph J. Ellis. 1998. "Founding Father." Nature 396: 13-14.

Morgan, Philip D. 1999. "Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, c. 1700-1820." In Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, eds. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, pp. 52-84. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Neiman, Fraser D. 2000. "Coincidence or Causal Connection? The Relationship between Thomas Jefferson's Visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings's Conceptions."  The William & Mary Quarterly 57: 198-210.

Rahe, Paul. 2011. "Minority Views of Professor Paul A. Rahe." In The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, ed. Robert F. Turner, pp. 345-52. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Rothman, Joshua D.  1999. "James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum America." In Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, 87-113.

Stockman, Farah. 2018. "Monticello Is Done Avoiding Jefferson's Relationship With Sally Hemings.:" The New York Times. June 16.

Turner, Robert F., ed.  2011. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

Evolution by Hybridization of a New Species of Galapagos Finches from a Founding Father

                                                     The Big Bird Finch of the Galapagos

Last year, in one of my posts on my second tour of the Galapagos Islands, I wrote about the evolution of new species through hybridization, including the report from Peter and Rosemary Grant that there might be a new species of finch on the island of Daphne Major arising from hybridization, although they had not yet said that this really was a new species.

Recently, the Grants have published their claim that this is indeed a new species that has evolved through hybridization (Lamichhaney et al. 2018; Wagner 2018).  In 1981, a male large cactus finch (Geospiza conirostris) arrived on Daphne Major, having immigrated a long distance (over 100 km) from the island of Espanola, the only island where this species is found.  They called him "Big Bird" because of his unusually large head.

Big Bird mated with a medium ground finch (G. fortis).  This pair produced offspring, and with only one exception, the offspring found mates descended from the original pair, thus breeding within the hybrid lineage, for over 30 years.  Because of their larger body size, they are called Big Birds.  So, as with the biblical story of Adam and Eve, we have a new species derived from a founding pair of mates.

Large cactus finches learn the distinctive song of their species by listening to their fathers sing, which is thus passed down through a culturally learned tradition.  The first Big Bird--the founding father--sang a unique song, slightly different from the song sang by male large cactus finches on Espanola.  This is the song now sung by male Big Birds, and it contributes to their reproductive isolation.

Another cue for reproductive isolation is that the size of the Big Birds' bill is intermediate between the bill sizes for the other species, which is probably a consequence of natural selection favoring a bill morphology adapted for feeding on certain kinds of seeds on Daphne Major.

Genetic analysis has confirmed that the Big Birds are a distinctive species separate from the other 18 species of finches on the Galapagos Islands.

Notice the historical contingency in this scientific study.  The rare and chance event of one individual bird with a unique song immigrating to Daphne Major and mating with a female of a different species, in the unique circumstances of that island at a particular historical moment, became a founding event for the evolution of a new species.

This illustrates the historical character of biology as the study of unique individuals with unique life histories and cultural traditions.  It is not true, therefore, that human beings are the only animals who have individual and cultural histories.  A biopolitical science of political animals must include the study of the individual personalities and the social history of those animals.  (I have written about this here, and here.)

My next post will be devoted to another kind of hybrid breeding by a founding father--Thomas Jefferson's interracial breeding with his slave Sally Hemings.


REFERENCES

Lamichhaney, Sangeet, Fan Han, Matthew T. Webster, Leif Andersson, B. Rosemary Grant, and Peter R. Grant. 2018. "Rapid Hybrid Speciation in Darwin's Finches." Science 359 (12 January): 224-228.

Wagner, Catherine E. 2018. "Improbable Big Birds." Science 359 (12 January): 157-159.

The "Supreme Judge" and "Divine Providence" in the Declaration of Independence

There are four references to a deity in the Declaration of Independence.  At the beginning of the document, the first two references are to "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and to the "Creator."  Then, at the end, in the penultimate sentence, there is a third reference in the formal declaration of independence: "We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states."  The final reference is in the last sentence: "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

Thus, God's government of the world has three branches: the legislative (the laws of Nature's God), the executive (Creator and Providence), and the judicial (Supreme Judge).

"Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" suggests the need for divine judgment as a sanction for law and morality.  Does human law and morality require belief in divine rewards and punishments?  Does that belief include a belief in the immortality of the soul in an afterlife where God can mete out eternal rewards in Heaven and eternal punishments in Hell?  And if so, does a Darwinian science of human evolution support or subvert those religious beliefs?

And if we must appeal to the Supreme Judge, how does He promulgate His judgments?  If the Supreme Judge is Nature's God, then we might have to rely on our human rational understanding of nature, in which case we would not need any supernatural revelation.

But if nature is not enough, and we do need some special revelation of God's supernatural message, we might look to the Bible, although the Declaration never refers to the Bible or any other holy book. So, for example, recently Attorney General Jeff Sessions has quoted from the Bible as supporting the controversial policy of the Trump administration for taking children away from parents who have entered the United States illegally.  Many Christians, including evangelical Christians who have supported Trump, have denounced this policy as immoral.  Sessions quoted from the thirteenth chapter of Romans where Paul apparently declares that the powers of government are ordained by God, and thus Christians have a duty to obey the government: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.  For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.  Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation" (Romans 13:1-2).  Since this policy of taking children away from parents who have crossed the borders illegally is a legal order of the government, Sessions indicates, those who resist this policy are resisting an ordinance of God, and they will be punished with damnation.

In response to Sessions, some Christians have pointed out that this same thirteenth chapter of Romans commands "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (13:9), and kidnapping children seems contrary to this commandment.

Some Christians have also pointed out that the 13th chapter of Romans was quoted by proslavery Christians to support obedience to the laws enforcing slavery.  In Slavery Ordained of God (1857J), the Reverend Fred Ross, a prominent Presbyterian minister in Alabama, cited Romans 13 and many other biblical teachings as supporting slavery.  Moreover, he argued, Romans 13 shows that the Declaration of Independence is a work of infidelity contrary to God's revelation in the Bible, because if government is ordained of God, then it is wrong to teach that government's authority comes from the consent of the people.  I will say more about Ross's argument in a future post on slavery and the Declaration.

This indicates the problem in appealing to the divine revelation of the Bible as a guide to the judgments of the Supreme Judge:  we often cannot agree on how to interpret the Bible and how to apply it to our lives.  As with any book, the language of the Bible is open to conflicting interpretations, as manifest in the history of Judaism and Christianity.  The American founders certainly saw this problem.  In The Federalist (no. 37), James Madison observed: "When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated."

Nevertheless, many of the American colonists settling in the New World in the seventeenth century thought the legal language of the Bible was clear enough to incorporate the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament into their colonial constitutions.  For example, the "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" of 1647 functioned as a constitution for Massachusetts, and it included many Mosaic laws in addition to English common law and what was considered natural law.  Part of this was a legally established Church that could punish heretics and infidels (Lutz, 1998, 95-135).

After the Declaration of Independence, however, those framing new state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation relied hardly at all on the divinely revealed laws of the Bible.  In his Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1786-1787), John Adams explained: "The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history."  Those who formed these new American governments did not claim "interviews with the gods" or "the inspiration of Heaven."  These thirteen governments were contrived "merely by the use of reason and the senses," and founded "on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery."  This experiment has succeeded so well, Adams concluded, that "it can no longer be called in question, whether authority in magistrates and obedience of citizens can be grounded on reason, morality, and the Christian religion, without the monkery of priests, or the knavery of politicians" (Adams, 2000, 117-19).

But notice that even as Adams scorns the pretense of grounding governmental authority on "the monkery of priests" who might claim "interviews with the gods," he still appeals to "the Christian religion" as important for enforcing political authority and obedience to the laws.  So if it doesn't mean legally enforcing the Mosaic laws and a politically established Church, what does it mean for government to be grounded on "the Christian religion"?

In an often-quoted passage of George Washington's Farewell Address, Washington insisted that religion was necessary for popular morality:

"And let us indulge with caution the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.  Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

And yet we can't help noticing that while stressing the importance of religion for the "national morality" of most people, Washington suggests that a few people with "minds of peculiar structure" don't need religion for their moral education.

Similarly, while Thomas Jefferson thought the Christian religion could support morality, religious belief was not absolutely necessary for moral conduct, because there was a natural moral sense inherent in human nature that could be known by natural human experience even without religious belief.   In a letter to Peter Carr (August 10, 1787), Jefferson laid out a plan of education for him, including the study of moral philosophy and religion.  He advised:

"Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of it's consequences.  If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort & pleasantness you feel in it's exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.  If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, & that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it" (Jefferson 1984, 903).

Jefferson refused to speak in public about his religious beliefs, because he insisted that religion was a private matter of conscience between oneself and God, and that freedom of conscience meant that no one should be forced into a public confession of one's faith or lack of faith.  Even in the presidential election of 1800, when ministers sermonized against him as an infidel or atheist, Jefferson refused to respond to this charge in public.

In private, however, in conversations and correspondence with his friends, he professed to believe in the purely moral teachings of Jesus, once they were cleansed of the corruptions coming from Platonic Christianity.  He thought that Jesus taught "the principles of pure deism."  "To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other" (letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803).  In the same letter where he identified himself as an Epicurean, Jefferson also identified Jesus as a "benevolent moralist," whose moral teaching needed to be rescued from the "artificial systems" of Christian sects, which included "the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc." (letter to William Short, October 31, 1819).  In other words, the corruptions of true Christianity included most of the fundamental doctrines of orthodox Christianity!

Jefferson's account of the moral teaching of Jesus striped of all the "artificial systems" looks like what Spinoza identified as "the dogmas of universal faith"--"that there exists a supreme being who loves justice and charity, and that, to be saved, all people must obey and venerate Him by practicing justice and charity towards their neighbor . . . or love of one's neighbor" (Theological-Political Treatise, 14.10).

To extract this pure moral teaching of Jesus from the Bible, Jefferson prepared his own revised version of the Bible.  He went through some Greek, Latin, French, and English translations of the Bible; he read the four gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--and cut out those passages that represented the true life and teachings of Jesus; and he then pasted these excerpts on pages with four columns so that the Greek, Latin, French, and English texts were parallel.  He arranged them in the chronological order of the life of Jesus from birth to death.  He cut out all the references to miracles--including the incarnation of Jesus as the Son of God, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, the water being turned into wine, the multitudes being fed on five loaves of bread and two fishes, and so on.  He gave it the title of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English.  He kept this for his private use.  It was never seen outside his family until it was sold to the Smithsonian Institution in 1895.  It was later published under the title Jefferson's Bible.  In 2011, the Smithsonian Institution published a beautiful facsimile edition of the original book.

Like Jefferson and the other deists among the American founders, Charles Darwin found it hard to believe in the miracles of the Bible: "the more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become."  He finally concluded that the Bible could not be a divine revelation. And yet he saw "the morality of the New Testament" as "beautiful" (Autobiography, 86).  In particular, he quoted Jesus' statement of the golden rule--"As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise" (Matthew 7:12)--as "the foundation of morality" (Descent of Man, 151).

Darwin thought that "the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality," although the idea of "a universal and beneficent Creator" was not instinctive but arose only at the end of a long history of cultural evolution (Descent, 682).

Darwin believed that morality could be explained as rooted in the natural evolution of a moral sense or the moral sentiments, as understood by David Hume and Adam Smith.  "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man" (Descent, 121).  "Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit" (Descent, 157).

For this moral sense, Darwin believed, the "reverence or fear of the Gods or Spirits" is "most important, although not necessary."  For example, we can reject the belief that "the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience," because we can explain the incest taboo as rooted in an evolved instinctive disgust towards sexual mating with close relatives (Descent, 138-39, 688; Variation of Animals and Plants, 2:104).

Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality has been deepened and confirmed by recent research in the evolutionary psychology of morality by those like Edward Wilson, Jonathan Haidt, and Joshua Greene.  (I have written about this here, here, and here.)

The importance of religious belief in moralistic "Big Gods" for the enforcement of morality in large agrarian states has been shown by Ara Norenzayan and his colleagues.  But they have also shown that with moral progress in cultural evolution, it is now possible in modern societies for people to be moral without religion--or good without God--although there is still some culturally evolved popular suspicion of atheists as less moral than religious believers.  (I have written about this here and here.)


REFERENCES

Adams, John. 2000. The Political Writings of John Adams. Ed. George W. Carey. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Darwin, Charles. 1959. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. Ed. Nora Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton.

Darwin, Charles. 1998. The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. 2 vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man. New York: Penguin Classics.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1984. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America.

Jefferson, Thomas. 2011. The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. With essays by Harry R. Rubenstein, Barbara Clark Smith & Janice Stagnitto Ellis. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.

Lutz, Donald, ed. 1998. Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Ross, Fred. 1857. Slavery Ordained of God. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.

Spinoza, Benedict de. 2016. Collected Works of Spinoza. Ed. & trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.