Human Progress: (1) More Lives and Longer Lives

If evolutionary success is measured by high rates of survival and reproduction, leading to a growing population, then the human species has been amazingly successful over the last two hundred years.  (See Max Roser's article on "World Population Growth.")

Some historians have estimated that in 10,000 BCE, the world population was 2.4 million.  By 1,000 CE, it was 295 million.  By 1800, it was 900 million.  So, for thousands of years, the human population grew, but very slowly.  The annual growth rate was probably never more than .5%. 

But after 1800, the annual growth rate increased to .8% in 1900 and to 2.2% in 1962, which was the highest rate of growth in human history.  After 1962, population has grown, but at a declining rate.  Population has grown from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000, and then to 7.5 billion at the end of 2016.

Growth in population depends on the combination of two factors--the rate of fertility and the rate of mortality.  Prior to 1800, the rate of fertility was often high, but the rate of mortality was also high.  Women gave birth to many children with the expectation that only a few would survive to adulthood.  In the 19th century, beginning in northwestern Europe and North America, fertility remained high, but mortality declined, because improved standards of health and sanitation based on improved knowledge in medical science and public health lowered the rate of infant mortality and lengthened life expectancy.  Consequently, population began to grow faster than ever before in human history. No country in the world today has a lower life expectancy than the countries with the highest life expectancies in 1800.

Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, the most developed nations began to show a drop in the rate of fertility.  Social scientists have called this the "demographic transition."  In the more developed countries, women delay the age of their first pregnancy, and they choose to have fewer children.  As parents invest more in the education of their children, and as women have more opportunities for investing in their careers outside the home, parents choose to have fewer children.  By the 1960s, some countries saw fertility rates fall below replacement levels (less than 2.1 children per woman), which brought a decline in population along with an ageing of the population. (See my previous post on the demographic transition.)

In recent years, however, there has been some evidence that as societies move into the very highest levels of human development--as measured by long life expectancy, great wealth, and high levels of education--the declining trend in fertility is being reversed. By 2005, Sweden and some other highly developed societies were showing this, although the increase in fertility was still not yet up to replacement levels. (See Mikko Myrskyla et al., "Advances in Development Reverse Fertility Declines," Nature 460 [6 August 2009]: 741-43.)  For me, this shows that the natural human desire for children will always assert itself, although parents in the socioeconomic circumstances of modern liberal societies will often prefer to invest heavily in fewer children.

Even if the demographic transition has slowed the rate of growth in world population, the stupendous growth in population has continued.  Is this a sign of human progress or not?  Many thinkers of the Liberal Enlightenment have said yes.  David Hume, for example, in his long essay on "Of the Populouness of Ancient Nations," criticized ancient nations for having a lower growth in population than modern nations, and he argued: "every wise, just, and mild government, by rendering the condition of its subjects easy and secure, will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches. . . . if every thing else be equal, it seems natural to expect, that, wherever there are most happiness and virtue, and the wisest institutions, there will also be most people" (Essays, Liberty Fund, p. 382).  Hume believed that population was growing faster in modern nations than in ancient nations because there was more liberty in modern nations: "human nature, in general, really enjoys more liberty at present, in the most arbitrary government of Europe, than it ever did during the most flourishing period of ancient times" (383).  After all, the primary difference between the economic life of the ancients and that of the moderns was the practice of slavery among the ancients.

Like Hume, Etienne Damilaville, in his article on "Population" in the French Encyclopedia, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, claimed that liberty fosters a growing population, because "it is under mild, limited governments, where the rights of humanity are respected, that men will become numerous" (Encyclopedic Liberty, Liberty Fund, p. 502).

This belief that growing population was a sign of human progress in a free society was challenged by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), who warned that since population tends to increase faster than the production of food, restricting the number of births was the only way to avoid famine and starvation.

This Malthusian pessimism has been adopted by many modern environmentalists, who insist that the modern growth in human population is unsustainable and must soon lead to a catastrophic collapse of human civilization.  In 1968, Paul Ehrich began his best-selling book The Population Bomb by declaring:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. . . . We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. . . . The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion" (11).

Ehrlich wrote that he first knew "the feel of overpopulation" during "one stinking hot night in Delhi":

"My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi.  The seats were hopping with fleas.  The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area.  The temperature was well over f100, and the air was a haze of dusty and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowing through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect" (15).

For an environmentalist like Ehrlich, Hell is "people, people, people, people"--too many people!

Ehrlich's prediction of massive famines in the 1970s in overpopulated countries like India proved false because of people like Norman Borlaug.  Borlaug, an agronomist from Iowa, spent his life developing high-yield hybrid crops that would solve the problem of global hunger.  His success in doing this was called the Green Revolution.  After working for many years helping farmers in Mexico, Borlaug moved in 1963 to India and Pakistan, where he showed farmers that they could have better crops with bigger yields.  He also advised governments that farmers should be paid market prices for their crops instead of imposing price controls to subsidize food for urban people, because such price controls would reduce the supply of food. Today, India and Pakistan produce seven times more wheat than they did before Borlaug arrived.  In 1970, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work increasing the global food supply and thus averting the famines predicted by Ehrlich in 1968.

Major famines have largely disappeared from the world.  The great famines of the 20th century were mostly man-made in illiberal regimes like the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and North Korea.  In the 21st century, socialist regimes like that in Venezuela continue to produce food shortages.  Mao's "Great Leap Forward" famine in China (1958-1962) killed 30 million people, making it perhaps the greatest single catastrophe in human history.  Once the collectivized farms in China were abolished, and farming was privatized, food production increased, and now China produces a surplus of food for world markets. The freedom for people to choose their own work, and to reap the rewards, has made this most populous nation on Earth prosperous.

For Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland, people like the Chinese farmers and Norman Borlaug illustrate the point that a growing human population is good, because people are so productive and inventive in solving problems that human beings are the "ultimate resource," and so having lots of them is good for us.  Simon's classical liberal approach to population made him Ehrlich's greatest adversary. 

Simon argued that there are no resources for human life without the human effort to discover and use them.  So, for example, petroleum is not inherently a resource. The Native Americans had no use for it.  It became useful only after human beings discovered how it could be used to satisfy human desires and then found efficient ways to extract it and sell it.

Of course, human beings are consumers of resources as well as producers, and people like Ehrlich assume that in general people consume more than they produce, so that population growth is bad. But Simon argued that growing human populations in free societies, where people are free to be inventively productive, will produce net increases in resources.

The Empirical Data for Human Progress through the Liberal Enlightenment

Human life today is better than it has ever been in human history, because we enjoy the benefits of two centuries of human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment.  Our time is the best of all times that human beings have ever known.

And yet most human beings around the world deny this.  As the above chart indicates, in surveys asking people whether the world is getter better, most people (94% in the United States, 96% in Great Britain and Germany) say no.  Many of those Americans who believe everything is getting worse voted for Donald Trump, because he appealed to their fear that America and the whole world are in decline, and because he persuaded them that only the leadership of a strongman can save them.

This popular pessimism is contradicted by empirical data that shows more human progress in the past two hundred years than at any time in previous human history.  For example, in public opinion surveys, most people around the world say that world poverty has been increasing.  In the United States, only 8% of the people believe that over the last 30 years the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has decreased.  But these 8% are correct.

In this chart, the top line shows the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2 a day (measured in international dollars according to prices of 2011), from 1820 to 1990.  In 1820, 94% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty.  In 1990, it was down to 52%.  For the second line, poverty is defined as living on less than $1 a day.  In 1820, 84% of the world's population lived in such poverty.  In 1990, it was down to 24%.  The shorter line to the right is based on World Bank data for 1980 to 2015 showing the level of poverty defined as living on less than $1.90 a day.  In 1980, 44% of the world population was living in such severe poverty.  By 2015, this was down to 9.6%.  This shows a steady decrease in extreme poverty over the last two hundred years, with the decrease accelerating over the past 30 years.  Moreover, economic historians have found evidence that for all of human history prior to about 1800 over 95% of human beings lived in such extreme poverty.

Perhaps the best place to find this kind of data is "Our World in Data" -- an online publication by Max Roser (an economist at Oxford University) that surveys the data on the development of human living conditions at a global scale.  Most of the data is presented in visual charts and global maps that show historical trends across time.

This data shows that human life in general is better today in at least ten ways:

(1) There are more lives and longer lives.
(2) Life is healthier
(3) Life is richer and less impoverished.
(4) Life shows more equality of opportunity.
(5) Life is more peaceful.
(6) Life is freer.
(7) Family life is better.
(8) Life is more environmentally sustainable.
(9) Life is more enlightened.
(10) Life is more virtuous.

Relying largely on the data collected by Roser, I will be writing a series of blog posts presenting some of the evidence for these ten progressive trends as caused by the norms and institutions of the Liberal Enlightenment that promote increasing freedom, knowledge, and technology. 

I can foresee, however, that most readers will not be convinced by this evidence.  The reason for this is that the human mind has evolved cognitive biases that make it hard for us to believe that human life is improving and easy for us to feel worried and dissatisfied. 

One such bias is what psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call the "availability heuristic."  The more memorable an event is, because it's horribly shocking, the more probable we think it is. 

So, for example, when we see shocking reports about terrorist attacks, we assume that such attacks are highly probable, and so we become terrified.  I remember a friend of mine in Manhattan, Kansas, telling me that when she first saw the television coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, she left her office, picked up her son at his elementary school, and returned home where she hugged him for hours.  Of course, she knew intellectually that her son in Kansas was in no danger of being attacked by terrorists.  But emotionally she felt as if her family was under attack.  Many Americans and many people around the world felt the same way that day.

In fact, that's the whole aim of terrorists--to throw an entire community of people into a state of panic.  After the killing of 14 people in a terrorist attack by radical Muslims in San Bernardino, California, in December of 2015, Trump proposed that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States.  But very few Muslims become terrorists. And the statistical possibility of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is extremely low.  Ordinary homicide is more likely.  But even homicidal violence in the United States has been declining since a peak in the early 1990s.  Nevertheless, the reports of terrorist attacks have such a shocking impact on us that we are inclined to be thrown into a panic that distorts our judgment about what should be done to protect ourselves.

The great danger here is that if we do not recognize the human progress brought to us by liberal norms and institutions, we might become so fearful and angry that we will turn away from our liberal principles and embrace the illiberal rhetoric of a demagogue who promises to save us.

Although the human progress achieved by the Liberal Enlightenment is real, it is not inevitable, as should be clear from the catastrophic suffering brought into the middle of the 20th century by the illiberal regimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.  The recent resurgence of ethnic nationalism in its attack on liberal globalism suggests that this could happen again.

The Paleolithic Origin of Science and Philosophy in the Art of Tracking

This is a video from 2001 of Karoha Langwane, a /Gwi tracker from Lone Tree in the central Kalahari, Botswana, running an eight-hour-long persistence hunt of a kudu bull (a species of antelope), which requires the cognitive skill for tracking animals. Karoha might be one of the last traditional hunters practicing the persistence hunt--chasing the hunted animal in the mid-day sun for hours until it collapses from overheating and exhaustion--which was probably the earliest form of human hunting, going back two million years among our hominid ancestors. Louis Liebenberg has argued that the speculative tracking required for such hunting involves the hypothetico-deductive reasoning that underlies the cognitive abilities for science: our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved an innate ability to use scientific reasoning when they interpreted tracks and signs and made testable predictions about animal behavior.

This is a video of Daniel Lieberman lecturing on "Brains, Brawn, and the Evolution of the Human Body."  Lieberman is a proponent of the "endurance running hypothesis"--the idea that our human bodies and brains are evolved for running long distances, because this was required for persistence hunting millions of years ago before the invention of hunting technology like bows and arrows.

The arguments here by Liebenberg and Lieberman help to resolve a paradox about human evolution first identified by Alfred Russel Wallace.  While Wallace was a co-discoverer along with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Wallace disagreed with Darwin in that Wallace did not believe that natural selection could fully explain the evolution of human beings in their high moral and mental capacities.  In his essay on "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," Wallace argued that the human brain was larger than it needed to be for survival as a primitive hunter-gatherer.  Natural selection, he observed, "has no power to produce absolute perfection but only relative perfection, no power to advance any being much beyond his fellow beings, but only so much beyond them as to enable it to survive them in the struggle for existence."  And yet human beings have mental powers for abstract thought, as expressed in art, science, mathematics, philosophy, and religion, that would not have been useful for the survival of our Paleolithic ancestors.  Such powers could not therefore have evolved by natural selection, because they would have been useless for the survival and reproduction of our prehistoric ancestors.

Wallace declared:

"The mental requirements of savages, and the faculties actually exercised by them, are very little above those of animals.  The higher feelings of pure morality and refined emotion, and the power of abstract reasoning and ideal conception, are useless to them, are rarely if ever manifested, and have no important relations to their habits, wants, desires, or well-being. They possess a mental organ beyond their needs.  Natural Selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher."

Since the evolution of such a brain could not be the work of natural selection, Wallace inferred, it must be the work of artificial selection by "some higher intelligence."  Just as human beings have artificially selected plants and animals to be bred for special traits, so this "higher intelligence" must have guided human evolution to achieve a high mental capacity.  Many readers assumed that this "higher intelligence" must be God.  But Wallace said this was a misconception, because this higher intelligence could be some kind of spiritual mind other than God.

Creationists and intelligent design theorists have seen Wallace as agreeing with their claim that natural science can see evidence of creative intelligence in the natural world, and particularly in the cognitive and moral capacities of the human mind that show evidence of supernatural design.

Similar to Wallace's argument is the argument of theistic evolutionists like C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga that an evolutionary naturalism becomes self-refuting if it denies the supernatural origin of the human mind.  The reasoning is that the theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science.  If we embrace metaphysical naturalism--the view that nothing exists except nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in naturalism, or anything else.  Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.

In my posts on Plantinga's argument (here and here), I have pointed out that the weak link in Plantinga's reasoning for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is his assumption that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. Plantinga asks us to imagine that we could have been naturally evolved for a state of complete and perpetual delusion.  Having taken this step of radical Cartesian skepticism, he then tells us--as Descartes did--that the only escape from such skepticism is to assume that God would never allow this to happen.  But as always is the case for the Cartesian skeptic, this all depends on imagining scenarios that are utterly implausible and unsupported by even a shred of evidence.  The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible.  The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in the mental fallibility that is familiar to us.

But despite this fallibility, the mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable or delusional.  Even Plantinga concedes that in the evolution of animals, "adaptive behavior requires accurate indicators."  So, for example, a frog must have sensory equipment that allows him to accurately detect flies so that he can catch them with his tongue.  And the honeybee waggle dance is a dramatic example of how evolution by natural selection favors adaptive behavior that tracks the truth about the world.

Similarly, evolution by natural selection has given human beings mental capacities that are reliable, even if fallible, in tracking the world.  If Liebenberg is right, the distinctively human mental capacities arose originally among prehistoric hunter-gatherers for the literal tracking of wild game, which created the capacity for the abstract hypothetical reasoning of modern science.

Archaeological evidence indicates that our hominid ancestors were hunting about two million years ago.  Without weapons such as bows and arrows, the only effective form of hunting was probably persistence hunting--chasing an animal during the hottest time of the day until it overheated and dropped from exhaustion.  Anatomical evidence indicates that human beings are the only primates that are designed for the endurance running required for persistence hunting. 

In easy tracking terrain, hunters could follow an animal's trail by looking for one sign after another. But in difficult terrain, the hunters had to imagine the likely route the animal might take so that they might reconstruct the animal's behavior and decide in advance where they might find signs.  This would require what Liebenberg calls "speculative tracking" that uses "hypothetico-deductive reasoning."  Based on their knowledge of animal behavior and of the physical environment, hunters had to interpret the visible signs of an animal's path in terms of some hypothesis as to how and where the animal was moving.

In modern science, the visible world is explained by a postulated invisible world.  So that, for example, physicists use particle colliders to create visible particle tracks that are explained by hypotheses about invisible structures (atoms and subatomic particles) and forces (such as gravity).  Similarly, ancient hunters tracking an antelope had to interpret visible tracks as signs to be explained by hypotheses about the invisible movements of the antelope.  This abstract mental capacity for hypothetical reasoning could evolve by natural selection because those hunters who were good at this were more likely to have antelope for dinner.

It has been observed, however, that only a few people in hunter-gatherer societies are successful at this, because only the most intelligent members of the society will have the capacity for such scientific reasoning.  Similarly, we know that only a few people--an Aristotle, an Isaac Newton, or an Albert Einstein--will have the intellectual capacity for the deepest scientific or philosophic inquiries.  And thus the philosophic or scientific life will be most fully expressed by only a few people, even though the capacity for philosophic and scientific reasoning is latent in evolved human nature.

This same capacity for imaginative, hypothetical reasoning that generates scientific and philosophic knowledge can also generate mythic fiction and superstition.  Knowledge is valuable, because if we can follow the tracks of the antelope, we find the antelope, and we can eat.  We can also derive some satisfaction in telling stories about the antelope deity, although we will never find it.


REFERENCES

Bramble, Dennis M., and Daniel Lieberman. 2004. "Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo." Nature 432 (18 November): 345-52.

Conniff, Richard. 2008. "Yes, You Were Born to Run." Men's Health 23 (May): 132-39. Available online.

Liebenberg, Louis. 2013a. The Origin of Science: The Evolutionary Roots of Scientific Reasoning and its Implications for Citizen Science. Cape Town, South Africa: Cybertracker.org. Available online.

Liebenberg, Louis. 2013b. "Tracking Science: The Origin of Scientific Thinking in Our Paleolithic Ancestors." Skeptic Magazine 18, no. 3: 18-23. Available online.

Wallace, Alfred Russel Wallace. 1870. "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man." In Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection: A Series of Essays. London: Macmillan.

Budziszewski's Critique of Darwinian Natural Law

J. Budziszewski (pronounced "Boojee-shef-skee") is a professor in the Departments of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas.  He is a prolific author best known for his writings on his Christian interpretation of natural moral law, which he finds in the work of Thomas Aquinas. His most recent book is a commentary on Aquinas's "Treatise on Law."

In a series of papers, Budziszewski has criticized my defense of natural law or natural right as grounded in a Darwinian account of human nature.  He criticizes me for my "determined attempt to make natural law safe for atheists."  For "natural law," he argues, one must "regard nature as the design of a supernatural intelligence."  By contrast, for "naturalism," one must "regard nature (in a physical or material sense as all there is."  What I defend, he says, is not "natural law" but "naturalism," and thus atheism.

I have responded to his criticisms in previous posts (here and here).

I was reminded of this debate while attending the recent meeting (October 28-29) of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  There was a special panel on Budziszewski's interpretation of natural law. 

As some of the panelists indicated, one of Budziszewski's main ideas is to oppose what he calls "the Second Table Project."  It is said that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone.  Traditionally, the first four commandments are identified as the first tablet or table, and they concern the worship of God; the last six commandments (beginning with honoring father and mother) are identified as the second table, and they concern moral laws.  Some Christians (Roger Williams, for example) have seen here a separation of Church and State, in that the Church enforces the first table of theological law, while the State enforces only the second table of moral law.  The first table requires religious faith.  But the second table can be known by natural reason.  The first table corresponds to divine law that can be known only by those who are believers in the Bible as divine revelation.  The second table corresponds to natural law that can be known by all human beings, even those who are not biblical believers, because it depends on natural human experience.  The second table can stand on its own natural ground without any necessary dependence on the supernatural.  But this is exactly what Budziszewski denies, because, he insists, there cannot be a natural law if there is no divine lawgiver.

I have argued that if we see what Aquinas calls natural law as corresponding to what Darwin calls the natural moral sense rooted in evolved human nature, then those people who have been infused with religious faith can understand that evolved human nature as the product of God's creative design working through the natural history of evolution, while those people who lack such faith can understand that evolved human nature as the product of an unguided natural history of evolution. 

Darwin leaves open the possibility of theistic evolution by employing Aquinas's idea of "dual causality"--the religious believer can see natural causes as secondary causes, as distinguished from divine causes as primary causes (the subject of a previous post).  (I have also written posts on the Catholic Church's acceptance of Darwinian evolution.) 

Whether we have faith or not, whether we are on the side of revelation or on the side of reason, we can all recognize the common morality of natural law or natural right.  Religious belief can reinforce that natural morality for those who are religious believers.  But those who lack any religious belief can still recognize that natural morality as dictated by our natural experience and natural reason.

Some of my critics--not only Budziszewski, but also Craig Boyd, C. Stephen Evans, John Hare, Carson Holloway, Matthew Levering, Stephen Pope, Richard Sherlock, John West, and Benjamin Wiker--have complained that this distorts Aquinas's teaching by ignoring the ways in which Aquinas makes natural law dependent on God as the creator of that law.  After all, Aquinas indicates that natural law belongs to God's eternal law, because a human being as a rational creature "has a natural inclination to his proper act and end, and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law" (ST, I-II, q. 91. a. 2).  Moreover, Aquinas indicates that human beings are directed to eternal happiness in Heaven as their final end, and for this they need divine law--the divinely revealed Biblical law of the Old and New Testaments--to instruct them how to achieve that eternal happiness (ST, I-II, q. 91, aa. 4-5).

But doesn't this confirm my claim about the autonomy of natural law as separated from divine law?  By natural law, Aquinas says, human beings are directed to their natural end of earthly happiness, which is "in proportion to the capacity of human nature."  Human beings cannot recognize their supernatural end--eternal happiness in Heaven--unless they believe in the divine law of the Bible (ST, I-II, q. 91, a. 4, ad 1).  The need for divine law to reveal supernatural ends shows that natural law by itself is directed to purely natural ends that can be known by natural experience without any belief in God or His commands.

Moreover, it is only by recognizing the autonomy of natural law that allows us to use the natural law to correct the divine law of the Bible.  Budziszewski's denial of natural law's autonomy makes this impossible.  Consider three examples of how natural law can correct the moral mistakes in the Bible.

First, Budziszewski says that recognizing "the wrong of deliberately taking innocent human life" is part of the natural law.  And yet, according to the Bible (Genesis 22), Abraham showed his faith in God by being willing to obey God's commandment to murder his innocent son Isaac.  Some Christians like Soren Kierkegaard have seen this Biblical story as teaching us "the suspension of the ethical" in our faith in God.  We must obey God's commands even when they are unethical.  But most people see this Biblical teaching as wrong, because we recognize that wrongness of killing innocent children, and thus our natural moral sense corrects the Bible.

Aquinas explains: "that which is done miraculously by the Divine power is not contrary to nature, though it be contrary to the usual course of nature. Therefore, . . . Abraham did not sin in being willing to slay his innocent son, because he obeyed God, although considered in itself, it was contrary to right human reason" (ST, II-II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2).  Here Aquinas shows us a direct contradiction between reason and revelation, natural law and divine law, and if we take the side of revelation and divine law, we must allow--even honor--the killing of innocent people whenever we think God has commanded it, even though this is "contrary to the usual course of nature" and "contrary to right human reason."

For Aquinas, there is no way of escaping this shocking contradiction between natural moral law and arbitrary divine command, because if he appeals to natural law to correct the Biblical story, he will be exposed to persecution from church authorities.  In fact, the Bishop of Paris had condemned faculty at the University of Paris who were accused of teaching pagan natural philosophy that was contrary to the Christian faith, and there were suspicions about Aquinas being one of that group.  We might consider the possibility that this forced Aquinas to engage in esoteric writing.

A second example of how natural law might correct the Bible is in correcting the religious violence of the Old Testament.  The last three popes--John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis--have all acknowledged that the Church needs to ask forgiveness for the religious violence practiced by the Church and endorsed by the Bible, including violence against heretics and apostates.  As Cardinal Ratzinger, and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Benedict XVI endorsed a remarkable statement of the International Theological Commission in 1999 on "The Church and the Faults of the Past."  This statement indicates that we must recognize that the Bible is mistaken when it reports God as commanding unjust violence.  This is said to require a "paradigm change"--"a transition from a sacral society to a pluralist society, or, as occurred in a few cases, to a secular society." 

So now, it seems that the Catholic Church has embraced liberalism in accepting the move from a premodern "sacral society," in which violence could be used to enforce religion, to a "pluralist society" or "secular society," based on religious toleration and nonviolence. (This has been the subject of a previous post.) 

At the conference at Aquinas College, conservative Catholics argued that the only escape from the morally corrupting relativism of America's liberal culture was to restore faithfulness to the moral teaching of the Catholic Church's Magisterium.  But they were largely silent about how the Church (beginning with Vatican II) has accepted the liberalism of toleration and pluralism as a correction of the illiberal religious violence endorsed by the Bible and by the premodern Church.  Until recently, the Church saw Protestant Christians as heretics who could be properly persecuted and even executed (see Robert Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority [Liberty Fund, 2012], 79-120).  Aquinas endorsed the Inquisition (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3). Now, even conservative Catholics like Budziszewski recognize that this was wrong in violating natural law.

A third example of natural law correcting the Bible is recognizing the wrongness of the Bible's endorsement of slavery.  While the Bible sanctions slavery (see my post here, which includes links to other posts), Budziszewski knows by natural law that this is wrong, and therefore he looks for some way to correct the Bible to conform to his natural moral knowledge that slavery is wrong.  He writes: "Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave.  At least they did eventually.  Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did--not spontaneously" (The Line Through the Heart, 36).  The explicit teaching of the Bible is that the "brotherhood of master and slave" is consistent with preserving slavery as a moral good, and this was the understanding of many Christians in the American South before the Civil War.  But Budziszewski rightly judges that Christians had to correct the Bible by seeing that human brotherhood demands the abolition of slavery as a great moral wrong.

As I have argued in Darwinian Natural Right, Darwin and others were able to see the wrongness of slavery as a violation of evolved human nature, and particularly of the natural desire for justice as reciprocity.

The Evolution of War and Lethal Violence

Over the years, I have written a long series of posts on whether evolutionary science can adjudicate the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau over whether our earliest human ancestors were naturally violent (as Hobbes argued) or naturally peaceful (as Rousseau argued).  Many social scientists have been vehement in taking one side or the other in this debate.  But I have argued that John Locke took a third position that is closest to the truth--that our foraging ancestors lived in a state of peace that tended to become a state of war.  Hobbes is partly right. Rousseau is mostly wrong. And Locke is mostly right.

Now a new study published in Nature has stirred up this debate again.  This research shows how human lethal violence against members of our own species is part of our evolutionary history as mammals. 

Jose Maria Gomez and his colleagues have compiled and analyzed the sources of mortality from a comprehensive sample of more than 4 million deaths from 1,024 mammalian species drawn from 137 mammalian families, which is 80% of the total number of mammalian families.  The data for humans was from over 600 studies, ranging from Paleolithic samples (50,000 to 12,000 years ago) to anthropological studies of the last few centuries. (J. M. Gomez, M. Verdu, A. Gonzalez-Megias, & M. Mendez, "The Phylogenetic Roots of Human Lethal Violence," Nature 538 [13 October, 2016]: 233-37). 

They applied comparative statistical techniques to the phylogeny (the family tree) of mammalian violence to reconstruct the rates of lethal violence, defined as killing by members of the same species.  They calculated that the rate of lethal violence at the phylogenetic origin of mammals was about 0.30%, which is approximately 1 in 300 deaths.  Rates of lethal violence increased across the family tree leading to primates--2.3% for the common ancestor of primates and tree shrews, declining slightly to 1.8% for the ancestor of the great apes (gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos), and then increasing to 2% at the origin of the human species, which is about six times higher than the rate at the origin of mammals.  Increases in lethal violence were correlated with increasing group living and territoriality.  Apparently, lethal violence increases when individuals are living close together and competing for territorial resources.

Gomez and his colleagues compared the phylogenetically inferred levels of human lethal violence with the levels observed in archaeological and anthropological records.  They found that the phylogenetic prediction of about 2% for prehistoric foragers was about the same as what emerged from their calculations from the archaeological records.  But they also found that levels of lethal violence rose far above 2% in historic times when human beings began to live in chiefdoms and states.  Levels of deaths by lethal violence did not begin to decline until about 500 years ago.  Finally, in the last 100 years, these levels fell to below 2% for the first time in human history.

In his commentary in Nature, Mark Pagel claims that this Gomez study supports the Hobbesian position that human beings are innately violent (Pagel, "Lethal Violence Deep in the Human Lineage," Nature 538 [13 October, 2016]: 180-81).  In an article in The Guardian, Steven Pinker is quoted as claiming that this study does support the Hobbesian position and Pinker's argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature about how modern societies have brought a dramatic reduction in violence from the high levels in prehistoric foraging societies.

On the contrary, John Horgan and Brian Ferguson have claimed that the Gomez study actually supports the Rousseauean position that war is not innate for human beings but largely a product of the cultural environments that arose after human beings left the ancient foraging life.

There are a number of points in dispute here.

The first point is that in measuring how often humans and other mammals kill members of their own species, the Gomez study makes no distinction between individual killing and killing in war.  So they include all forms of human-on-human killing, which includes individual homicides and infanticide.  Rousseaueans like Brian Ferguson and Douglas Fry agree that prehistoric foragers often killed one another, but almost all of this homicidal killing arose in personal disputes or feuding, and so, they argue, this was not warfare.  But notice what this means: the Rousseaueans are conceding that our foraging ancestors were not utterly peaceful, as Rousseau claimed, because they did sometimes kill one another, although this was not killing in war between groups.  One can find high rates of individual killing among ancient foragers, but without war.

The second point is that the Gomez study's estimate of 2% of deaths among ancient foragers being due to lethal violence is much lower than the estimates by Pinker and others of 15-25% of deaths due to warfare.  While Pagel claims that the Gomez study shows "hunter-gatherer societies as being engaged in constant battles" (181), the Gomez study actually concludes that the 2% rate "contrasts with some previous observations," such as that of Pinker (235).

The third point is that the Gomez study shows that rates of lethal killing increase (from 2% to 9%) with the move from ancient foraging bands to chiefdoms.  These high rates do not drop below 2% until the last 100 years.  This looks like the pattern suggested by Douglas Fry--like the letter n--low violence in the ancient foraging past, then increasing violence in more complex societies, followed by declining violence in contemporary states.  Pinker might argue that this conforms to the Hobbesian pacification thesis, because the only form of social order that reduces violence is the modern centralized state.  Ferguson and Fry seem to concede this.  This shows that both the Hobbesians and the Rousseaueans can agree that violence is not genetically determined, because the expression of the natural capacity for violence depends on the social environment.  As Azar Gat has said, "war is innate, but optional."

The fourth point is that the rates of lethal violence in prehistoric bands and tribes is much lower than for bands and tribes studied by anthropologists over the past few centuries.  This suggests that foraging societies become more violent after having contact with colonial societies, and that such high levels of violence cannot be found in the archaeological record for ancient prehistoric foragers.

The final point is that the two living ape species most closely related to humans--chimps and bonobos--show conflicting evidence as to whether the primate phylogeny of humans favors an innate propensity to violence.  Chimpanzees show male coalitional raiding leading to killing that looks like primitive warfare similar to what people like Richard Wrangham see among human foragers.  But there is no clear evidence for even a single case of conspecific killing among bonobos.  Pagel writes: "Even the usually peaceful bonobo Pan paniscus can sometimes display violent behavior" (181).  But he does not cite any evidence for bonobo lethal violence.

In the Supplementary Material for their article (found online at the Nature website), Gomez and his colleagues provide the data for mammalian lethal violence.  For chimpanzees, they say there is documentation for 734 deaths and for 4.49% of these being deaths from conspecific killing.  For bonobos, it's 145 deaths and 0.68% conspecific deaths.  For the bonobo data, they cite five articles.  Apparently, they are relying on one "suspected" case of conspecific killing for bonobos.  But when I contacted Frances White, the leading observer of bonobos in the wild, and asked her about this, she said that this one case is very dubious, and that there is no clear case of conspecific killing among bonobos.  She said that there were at least three cases of bonobo cannibalism, but there was no evidence that these were cases of killing rather than eating already dead carcasses.

It's easy to understand why the Rousseaueans love the bonobos--there're the hippie apes who make love not war.

On the other hand, it's also easy to understand why the Hobbesians love the chimps and not the bonobos, because the chimps are closer to Hobbesian expectations for a evolutionarily close human relative.  Frances White once observed:

"As we have found out more about how bonobos behave in the wild, they have declined in favor as a model for our ancestor . . . This makes me wonder how much our use of models is influenced by how we would like our ancestor to have behaved--clearly the bonobo has fallen from grace because it shows what, for many, is behavior that is socially unacceptable for a close relative of ours."

Some of my other posts on the evolution of war and violence are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Socialism and Human Nature: Cosmides, Tooby, Haidt, and Hayek

For the classical liberal proponents of capitalism, who point to the long history of socialism's moral and economic failures, it's hard to understand the continuing popular appeal of socialism, as illustrated most recently by the popularity of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. 

Friedrich Hayek explained this by arguing that socialism was an atavistic appeal to the moral instincts of our foraging ancestors, and that capitalism was a recent artificial construction of culture that required the repression of those innate instincts of human nature as shaped in foraging bands hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Some of those classical liberals influenced by Hayek have wondered whether the evolutionary psychology of those like Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jonathan Haidt confirms Hayek's insight about how a capitalist culture must fight against a socialist nature.  Against this, I have argued that this is a mistake, because it fails to see how capitalist liberal culture appeals to the evolved human instincts for social exchange or trade and for the liberty expressed as resistance to oppression.

A few weeks ago, the Cato Institute organized a panel of speeches by Cosmides, Tooby, and Haidt on the topic of "Socialism and Human Nature," which can be seen online as a video.  (I thank Kent Guida for alerting me to this.)  Although their comments provide a partial confirmation for Hayek's atavism thesis, they implicitly reject Hayek's claim that capitalism is a purely cultural artifact that requires the repression of evolved human nature; and thus they end up close to my argument.

Cosmides begins by noting that Karl Marx had been persuaded by some anthropologists (Lewis Henry Morgan, in particular) that our ancient foraging ancestors shared their food in ways that showed that they were living in primitive communism based on the decision rule "from each according to his ability to each according to his need."  Marx thought that after the overthrow of modern capitalism, a modern form of communism could be established by reviving this instinctive propensity to communist sharing.

Cosmides argues that Marx was partially right, in that foragers did have rules for sharing large game from hunting and for sharing within families, and that this was an evolved instinct of human nature.  But Marx was wrong in not seeing that among foragers there were many different evolved systems regulating cooperation, and that sharing the food from hunting was only one. 

Hunting among foragers is a highly risky and highly variable activity, and much of the variance is due to luck.  To protect themselves against the bad luck of failing to capture any game animals, hunters engage in risk pooling, which constitutes a kind of insurance system.  Those lucky hunters who come back from the day's hunt with meat must share some of their meat with those unlucky hunters who failed to capture any meat.  The lucky hunters do this because they know that tomorrow they might be the unlucky ones who will need the lucky ones to share.

In this account of hunting among foragers, Cosmides relies on a paper by Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill on the Ache foragers of Paraguay.  We might wonder whether this foraging group is representative of our prehistoric ancestors, and whether we can draw general conclusions about human nature from studying this one group.  As indicated in a previous post, some anthropologists think that foraging societies are too variable to justify any generalizations about evolved human nature. (See Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan, "Why Do Male Foragers Hunt and Share Food?" Current Anthropology 34 [1993]:701-706; and Hillard Kaplan and Michael Gurven, "The Natural History of Human Food Sharing and Cooperation: A Review and a New Multi-Individual Approach to the Negotiation of Norms," in Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, eds., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005], 75-113.)

In contrast to hunting, gathering food (plants and small animals) shows low variance and less risk.  Those who make the effort to go gathering are usually successful.  They share this food within their family.  But they do not need to share with other families, because unlike hunting, there is no need to pool risk.

There is a third form of cooperation, in which foragers reciprocate or trade goods within their band or with people in other bands.

All of these evolved systems of cooperation are part of our evolved human nature that we still have today.  Even though most of us today have never lived as hunter-gatherers, and so we have never learned the culture of hunting-gathering society, we still have the instinctive rules of cooperation of the foraging mind that can be evoked as cultural patterns of behavior when environmental cues activate specific evolved mechanisms (see 8:37 in the video).

Consequently, socialism can appeal to us today by evoking the evolved rules of sharing for risk pooling.  But this is a "mismatch" in that these rules evolved for sharing among small bands of hunters for which the rules were adaptive, but these rules are maladaptive for large modern societies in which people are interacting anonymously with thousands or millions of people.  Trying to organize a large modern economy in a socialist system based on the generalized generosity of sharing fails.

Cosmides seems to suggest, therefore, that Hayek was right to see socialism as failing because of this mismatch.  But she also suggests that Hayek was wrong to present capitalism or the extended order of markets as a purely cultural artifact that must repress the evolved instincts of human nature, because he failed to see how capitalism could be understood as evoking the evolved system of cooperation through social exchange or trade.  In contrast to Cosmides, Hayek seemed to present capitalism as a "culturally-accumulated package of norms gradually acquired via content-free learning and imitation" (12:33).  Against Hayek, Cosmides argues that different instinctive rules can be triggered by the experience of different environmental cues, so that capitalist institutional cues can trigger trading behavior for mutually beneficial exchange. While Hayek argued that there was no evidence for trading behavior earlier than a few thousand years ago, after the emergence of agriculture, Cosmides seems to see evidence for trading going far back into ancient foraging bands.  Actually, Hayek occasionally conceded that there was archaeological evidence for long-distance trade in the Paleolithic age at least 30,000 years ago (The Fatal Conceit, 38-42).

Similarly, in Tooby's speech, he observed that "vast market-based economic systems exploit for their amazing productivity one cognitive system that evolved to handle explicit contingent exchange (the social exchange system)," and that "the effects of most other psychological mechanisms terminate locally (parenting, love, friendship), but explicit exchange can extend far beyond individual perception globally through the miracle of markets" (38:40).  For our foraging ancestors, trade or explicit exchange was "only a minor part of economic life," which is still true for us today in our personal lives, but today explicit exchange has become a major part of our economic life.

Tooby and Cosmides have made this same point in a recent article: "The dazzlingly extended forms of modern cooperation we see today (Adam Smith's division of labor supporting globe-spanning trade) appear differentially built out of adaptations for small-scale sociality that modularly scale, such as exchange--rather than the marginal benevolence of Smith's butcher, brewer, and baker" ("Human Cooperation Shows the Distinctive Signatures of Adaptations to Small-Scale Social Life," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, January, 2016).  So they seem to say that Smith was right about the "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another" being a evolved "propensity of human nature."  And even if this propensity to exchange was only a small part of the economics of ancient foraging bands, it could be evoked in the modern world of the global market order to sustain the liberal social order.

Haidt makes this point again at the beginning of his speech: "We evolved to do tribalism and trade" (51:14).  Living within families and small groups, we are collectivists in evoking the social instincts of our foraging mind.  But in the extended order of markets, we are traders in evoking the foraging instincts for social exchange.  The expansion of trading networks over the past five thousand years and the explosive expansion over the past two hundred years have been cultural extensions of the innate propensities for trade.

We are also libertarians in evoking "liberty/oppression" as one of the moral foundations of our evolved human nature, Haidt argues.  Here he appeals to Christopher Boehm's account of how foragers protect their autonomy as free individuals by resistance to the dominance behavior of those who might become bullies or tyrants.  If this is part of our evolved human nature, as Boehm claims, then this would show how Adam Smith's "system of natural liberty" could be rooted in our innate instincts.

Moreover, as I have argued in some of my posts on Haidt, the moral principle of liberty can be seen as not just one of six moral foundations, as he says, but also as the one principle that secures the conditions for the full expression of the other five foundations.

Part of this is that a liberal society allows human beings to satisfy their desires for personal social bonding in civil society.  A fundamental principle of liberal thought, as Hayek emphasized, is the importance of civil society as lying between the individual and the state--a social realm in which human beings are free to express their social needs through the natural bonds of family life and the voluntary associations of life.  This allows human beings to satisfy their instinctive needs for familial and social bonding in small groups comparable to those of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

So, contrary to Hayek's insistence that the liberal social order requires the cultural repression of our evolved human nature, Cosmides, Tooby, and Haidt show how we can understand classical liberalism as securing the fullest satisfaction of our evolved natural desires.

It is remarkable, however, that it is only recently that Cosmides and Tooby have begun to publicly speak about how evolutionary psychology might support classical liberalism or libertarianism.  Over most of their career, they did not speak about this, or they even invoked the fact/value dichotomy in saying that as empirical scientists they could not endorse any normative claims about morality or politics.  But those who know Cosmides and Tooby well have known that from a young age they were classical liberals in their thinking, and much influenced by free market thinkers like Hayek.  Cosmides has said that she was influenced by reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as a young woman. 

Their reason for being quiet about this until recently is suggested by Tooby's casual remark at the beginning of his statement: he says that the topic--"Socialism and Human Nature"--is "fascinating" but "potentially career-ending."  In other words, Tooby and Cosmides have not spoken publicly about this until now because in earlier years they would have been risking the failure of their academic careers by arguing for classical liberalism, which would have shocked their academic colleagues; but now that they have become successful in their academic reputations, they can come out as classical liberals. 

The turning point might have been in 2008 when they wrote an entry on "Evolutionary Psychology" for The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism published by the Cato Institute.  They probably would not have done this earlier in their career.

Some of my other posts on Cosmides and Tooby are here, here. and here. Posts on Haidt are here, here., and here.

Debating Hayek's Atavism Thesis at George Mason University

 I recently participated in the Invisible Hand Seminar at George Mason University, which is directed by Daniel Klein of the Economics Department.  The Economics Department at GMU is one of the best places for studying Austrian School Economics.  Klein directs an Adam Smith Program, in which graduate students study The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.

The title of my presentation was "The Darwinian Evolution of Smithian and Hayekian Liberalism."  A large part of my presentation was an argument against Friedrich Hayek's Freudian theory of capitalism as requiring the cultural repression of the evolved instincts of human nature that favor socialism.  Hayek agreed with Karl Marx and Lewis Henry Morgan that originally human beings lived in primitive communism.  As I have indicated in many posts on this blog, I think Adam Smith was closer to the truth in his claim that the commercial society is rooted in  "a certain propensity in human nature"--"the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another"--and that this natural propensity to trade must have appeared among our prehistoric ancestors.

We had a lively discussion of this issue in the seminar.  Afterwards, Klein sent me these comments:

 

"I and others were provoked by your criticism of Hayek with respect to the atavism thesis. I take you to be accentuating that liberalism suits the natural instincts of man, while Hayek accentuates that liberalism does not suit the natural instincts of man. I think your discussion nicely highlights the tension here, that Hayek cannot coherently insist on too great an unsuitableness, for otherwise he loses whatever warrants he has for judging liberalism more desirable than the alternatives."

"I think the proper posture is some-ways-suitable, some-ways-unsuitable, and, on the whole, liberalism beats the alternatives. I haven’t gone back and reread Hayek’s “The Three Sources,” but I don’t understand him to be proposing to make custom the sole legitimate source. I understand him to be bending the rod the opposite way to get it straight, thus emphasizing the need to repress and rechannel certain natural instincts. I think that liberals need to better sort out which natural instincts need attention, and whether we should aim at repressing them or rechanneling them."

I agree with Hayek that there can be some tension between "two worlds"--the world of intimate, face-to-face interactions in families and small groups and the world of impersonal and abstract interactions in the extended order of markets.  But I don't agree with Hayek's claim that while the first world is part of our evolved instinctive human nature, the second world is a cultural invention that requires the repression of the first world's instincts.  I believe that the evidence for trading networks among our prehistoric ancestors appears hundreds of thousands of years ago, and therefore the propensity for trading and reciprocal exchange is probably instinctive for us.

While Hayek generally assumed that trade did not exist at all until the last few thousand years of human history, he occasionally admitted that there was some evidence of trade going back hundreds of thousands of years (Fatal Conceit, 11, 16-17, 29, 38-45, 60, 133).  He wrote: "Some specialization and exchange may already have developed in early small communities guided entirely by the consent of their members.  Some nominal trade may have taken place as primitive men, following the migration of animals, encountered other men and groups of men" (38).  This weakens his claim that trade was a recent cultural invention with no instinctive roots.

Klein questions my interpretation of Hayek as arguing that the liberal social order is rooted in purely cultural traditions that are contrary to human instincts.  But in his "Three Sources of Human Values," Hayek seems clear in affirming that liberalism must be grounded only in human tradition, and not at all in human nature or human reason.  He wrote:

"The transition from the small band to the settled community and finally to the open society and with it to civilization was due to men learning to obey the same abstract rules instead of being guided by innate instincts to pursue common perceived goals.  The innate natural longings were appropriate to the condition of life of the small band during which man had developed the neural structure which is still characteristic of Homo sapiens. . . . It would probably be more correct to equate these 'natural' instincts with 'animal' rather than with characteristically human or good instincts.  Indeed, the general use of 'natural' as a term of praise is becoming very misleading, because one of the main functions of the rules learned later was to restrain the innate or natural instincts in the manner that was required to make the Great Society possible.  We are still inclined to assume that what is natural must be good; but it may be very far from good in the Great Society.  What has made men good is neither nature nor reason but tradition. . . ." (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 3, p. 160)

If the Great Society--the liberal social order--requires a cultural repression of human nature, because it cannot satisfy the natural human desires, why would we want to prefer this to a socialist social order that conforms to human nature?

I have written many posts on Hayek's atavism thesis.  One post includes links to the others.

How Classical Liberalism Has Shaped the Evolution of the Modern Family: Hayek and Horwitz

The title of Steven Horwitz's new book is surprising: Hayek's Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  This is surprising because Friedrich Hayek and other classical liberal thinkers have said little about the family.

As Horwitz himself indicates, Hayek's published writing on the family consists of nothing more than a few sentences scattered across some of his articles and books, although some of those sentences do indicate that Hayek thought family life was important, even crucial, for a liberal social order. 

Moreover, as Horwitz also indicates, theorists of classical liberalism have generally had great trouble in accounting for the moral status of children under parental care.  When classical liberals affirm the equal liberty of all human beings, they assume that these human beings are all mature adults, which ignores the obvious fact of human nature that all adults must have started their lives as children under the care of parents or parental surrogates, and so as children under parental authority, they could not have enjoyed the liberty of adults in making decisions for themselves.  For example, when John Stuart Mill in On Liberty makes his famous argument for individual liberty, he has to add the qualification that, of course, such liberty cannot rightly be exercised by children until they reach mature adulthood. 

The libertarian Murray Rothbard has argued that in a free society children should be treated as the property of their parents, because while adults have the freedom that comes from self-ownership, children do not.  But, surely, Horwitz observes, children cannot be rightly treated as the property of their parents, because as human beings, children have the potential for growing into adults who will claim their natural freedom for self-rule.  So we should see that children have some rights as human beings but not all the rights of human adults.  In a liberal social order, we will hold parents responsible for rearing their children in such a way that the children will become mature adults capable of exercising their individual freedom.  We might say that parents exercise stewardship over their children.  Furthermore, the success of a liberal social order depends on the socialization of children in the family so that they learn the social norms and habits of a liberal society.

Here Horwitz implicitly follows the reasoning of John Locke, although he does not mention Locke.  In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke recognized that in a free society, children would be under the authority of their parents, and the parents would be obligated to rear and educate their children so that they could exercise their individual liberty as adults.  In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke advised parents on how to educate their children in the moral and intellectual virtues required for a liberal social order.

This suggests that the relationship between family life and classical liberalism is one of mutual influence.  The family must promote liberal ideas, just as those liberal ideas must shape the family.  And, indeed, Horwitz's book is an account of the coevolutionary process through which classical liberalism has both shaped and been shaped by the modern family.

Horwitz's evolutionary history of the family employs three ideas from Hayek: (1) spontaneous order and deliberate organization, (2) the problems of knowledge and incentives, and (3) living in two worlds.

Against the common assumption that whatever is orderly must have been designed, classical liberals like Hayek argue that social order often arises best through undesigned evolution, just as Darwinian scientists explain the evolution of the natural and social world through an unintentional or unplanned process.  This is what Hayek, following Michael Polanyi, called spontaneous order.

For classical liberals, free markets provide a model of spontaneous order.  Through the buying and selling of goods and services, economic agents pursuing their diverse individual ends create a pricing system as the unintended outcome of their actions.  This market model can explain other kinds of spontaneous order, such as language, for example.  The languages that we speak have not been designed from the top down by any single mind or group of minds.  Rather, all of those who speak a language as a means to their diverse ends contribute to the continuing evolution of the language as the product of their linguistic actions but without any central design.

Spontaneous order works best for very complex social institutions involving many individuals pursing a multiplicity of ends.  But for simpler social institutions involving a small number of people acting for some shared end, order can arise better through deliberate organization by designing minds.  The family, Hayek thought, is an example of such a deliberate organization, because in a small family, the parents can know enough about the family members to design the social life of the family to achieve the common good of the family.

All social institutions, Hayek thought, must solve the problems of knowledge and incentives.  The knowledge of all the circumstances of a social group relevant to the problems of that group can be widely dispersed across the group.  And whoever has that knowledge must have the personal incentives to use it for the good of the whole group.  A large economy cannot be planned, because the planners cannot gather all of the necessary knowledge that is dispersed in the minds of thousands or even millions of people in the economy, and because even if the planners had such knowledge, their selfish interests would not give them the incentives to plan the economy for the common benefit of all.  Central economic planners would have to be both perfectly omniscient and selflessly benevolent.  A free market economy organizes the production and consumption of goods and services to satisfy consumer preferences without central planning.

In a small family, however, the parents can have sufficient knowledge of the needs and capacities of their children and sufficient incentives to care properly for their children, so that parents can deliberately plan the organization of their family to achieve the shared ends of the family.  This explains why abolishing the family is impossible: without the family organized around parental care of children, it's unlikely that anyone would have the knowledge and incentives to do as well as parents do in caring for their children.  So while Hayek believes that spontaneous order is the best way to manage an economy, he also believes that deliberate organization is the best way to manage a family.

This creates a conflict in modern life where we must live in two different worlds with different rules.  On the one hand, we live in families and other organizations (like firms and community groups) based on intimate, face-to-face relationships of moral concern for one another.  On the other hand, we live in the extended order of anonymous exchange in complex market economies based on impersonal rules. 

Socialists have argued that our social world would be more just if it were organized like a large family, so that everyone treated one another as brothers and sisters.  But Hayek insisted that this attempt to turn the spontaneous order of the market into the deliberate organization of a family must fail in ways that will destroy the extended order of impersonal exchange that makes modern economic life possible.

Hayek argued:

"If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (or wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it.  Yet if we wee always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them.  So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once." (The Fatal Conceit, p. 18)

Hayek compared his argument here to Sigmund Freud's argument in Civilization and Its Discontents.  Just as Freud thought that the moral order of civilization required the repression of the sexual instincts that had been freely expressed in primitive human societies, Hayek thought that the extended order of modern civilization made possible by capitalist markets required the repression of the collectivist instincts that had governed the families and foraging bands of our primitive human ancestors.  The socialism that Hayek opposed was powerfully appealing to human beings because it conformed to their evolved moral instincts for life in families and small bands: Hayek believed that "an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition" (Fatal Conceit, p. 19).

Although I mostly agree with Horwitz in how he uses this Hayekian theme of living in two worlds to tell the story of the evolution of the family, I disagree with his Hayekian claim that the extended spontaneous order of a liberal society requires repressing the moral instincts of evolved human nature. 

If Adam Smith was right, as I think he was, in seeing the opulence that results from exchange and specialization in a commercial society as the necessary consequence of "a certain propensity in human nature," which is "the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another," then that natural propensity to trade must have evolved in our prehistoric ancestors, it must have been expressed across human history, and this must have been the natural propensity that could be cultivated by the ideas and institutions of bourgeois liberalism over the past two hundred years to create first the Industrial Revolution and then the Great Enrichment, which have shaped the evolution of the modern family.  If this were not true, it would be hard to explain why human beings would want to render themselves desperately unhappy by repressing their deepest instincts for socialism in choosing capitalism.

If Horwitz and Hayek are right, then our prehistoric foraging ancestors did not live in two worlds at once.  They lived in only one world--the world of face-to-face, intimate groupings in families and small bands or tribes, the world of deliberate organizations without any spontaneous orders.  Marriage was a way of extending cooperation by forming alliances of groups bound together by marital ties.  But there could be no anonymous social order based on mutually beneficial trading. 

This ignores the archaeological evidence for extensive trading networks among prehistoric foragers.  Occasionally, even Hayek acknowledges the evidence for long-distance trade in the Paleolithic age and later in ancient Mediterranean civilization (Fatal Conceit, 38-44). 

Horwitz cites the work of evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby as supporting the Hayekian idea of a "mismatch" between the natural human psychology of the "environment of evolutionary adaptation" in the Paleolithic and human responses to modern environments of global commerce.  But he does not cite the observation of Cosmides and Tooby that the adaptive psychology for social exchange that evolved among our ancient forager ancestors shows adaptation for trading over vast distances (see, for example, Cosmides and Tooby, 1992, pp. 216-17).

According to Horwitz, it was not until the development of agriculture and sedentary life that human beings organized themselves into premodern families that lived in two worlds.  Agriculture led to specialization and exchange, in which the married couple separated themselves from the community of the band or tribe, and the family became the basic economic and political unit of the social world.  The agrarian family lived in two worlds, because the economic functions of the family were divided between producing for the household and producing for the market.

As an economic organization, the agrarian family saw children as units of production.  Having children was a way to increase the labor force of the household and to provide old-age insurance for the parents.  Although husbands and wives loved one another and loved their children, premodern families lived in a world of poverty that made the organization of the family primarily a matter of economic calculation in the struggle for survival, and only secondarily a matter of emotional satisfaction and personal happiness.

Horwitz has been greatly influenced by Stephanie Coontz's book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (Viking, 2005).  As the title indicates, Coontz sees the modern marriage and family based on love and intimacy as a recent break from a long history of marriage and family life understood as a purely economic arrangement.   Until recently, Coontz observes, married couples were not "soul-mates" but "yoke-mates."  Even so, they were not really "mates," if that implies equality, because premodern marriages were patriarchal in the husband's dominance over the wife.

Among the few people who were wealthy, premodern marriage had not only an economic function but also a political function, in that marriage was a way for powerful families to merge and thus consolidate their power.

As organized for economic and political functions, premodern marriage was, as Coontz says, "a matter of practical calculation rather than an arrangement entered into for individual fulfillment and the pursuit of happiness" (Marriage, p. 65).

All of this has been changed over the past 250 years by the triumph of the economic, moral, and political ideas and institutions of classical liberalism.  As wage labor became the primary source of income, agricultural and household labor became less important, and consequently the family largely lost its economic functions.  This separation of work from the home and the general increase in wealth made it easier for individuals to live independently without dependence upon a family.  As classical liberalism promoted individual liberty in economic, social, and political life, human relationships were understood as based on individual consent.  And thus marriage was seen as founded on freely chosen consent.  For the first time in history, marriage was understood as a love match for the personal satisfaction of the individuals marrying and the children they would rear.

Coontz summarizes the consequences:

"During the eighteenth century, the spread of the market economy and the advent of the Enlightenment wrought profound changes in record time.  By the end of the 1700s, personal choice of partners had replaced arranged marriage as a social ideal, and individuals were encouraged to marry for love.  For the first time in five thousand years, marriage came to be seen as a private relationship between two individuals rather than one link in a larger system of political and economic alliances.  The measure of a successful marriage was no longer how big a financial settlement was involved, how many useful in-laws were acquired, or how many children were produced, but how well a family met the emotional needs of its individual members." (pp. 145-46)

As wages and wealth rose in the second half of the nineteenth century, men could support their families on their own, and so women and children could withdraw from the labor force.  With less need for children to work, childhood could become a time for development through education and play.  Individuals could afford to invest in education and training that would increase their value as workers.  For the first time in history, most adults learned to read, and eventually children could become college-educated.

Thus, as Horwitz argues, classical liberalism and the capitalism it promoted shaped not only the impersonal world of markets but also the personal world of the family in ways that fostered human flourishing through the bourgeois virtues (as Deirdre McCloskey has called them).  Previously, the premodern family had depended mostly on the calculative economic virtues of prudence.  But the modern bourgeois family could foster all of the moral and intellectual virtues.  Consequently, Horwitz observes, "capitalism thereby humanized the family" (98).

This moral improvement in the human family brought by classical liberalism and capitalism contradicts Hayek's famous argument that the free society cannot be a just or moral society, because the impersonal interactions of the market cannot reward merit, and therefore a free market society must suppress the moral instincts that evolved in the personal interactions of our ancient foraging ancestors living in families and bands.  As Horwitz observes, Hayek thought that capitalism must resist "the atavistic callings of our moral instincts" (99).  Horwitz must disagree with Hayek about this in showing how capitalism has improved not just the material conditions of life but also the moral and intellectual excellence of human life.

One way that Horwitz explains this moral progress in family life caused by capitalism is by arguing that bourgeois families have been able to climb from the bottom to the top of Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of basic human needs."  Maslow arranged these basic human needs as a pyramid, moving from physiological needs and safety needs at the bottom to the higher needs of love/belonging and self-esteem and then finally to self-actualization at the top.  Throughout human history, Horwitz argues, most human beings in their families had to be almost totally concerned with the lower needs of survival and safety.  Only in the last two centuries, the ideas and institutions of classical liberalism have created a world of abundance and opportunity in which most human beings are free from worry about securing their lower needs and can pursue the satisfaction of their higher needs for love, self-esteem, and self-actualization.

One might wonder, however, whether a family devoted to the self-actualizing happiness of its individual members can do the job of socializing children that is required for a liberal social order to succeed.  Horwitz raises this question in an article that asks the question "Is the Family a Spontaneous Order?" (Studies in Emergent Order, 1 [2008]: 163-185).

The answer to the question of whether the family is a spontaneous order, Horwitz suggests, is twofold: "It depends" and "Maybe."  It depends on whether we are asking about the general history of the family or about the operation of individual families.  The general history of the family certainly is a spontaneous order, because it's an undesigned spontaneous evolution from prehistoric families to agrarian families to modern families. 

But if we're asking about how individual families are organized, then the answer is "Maybe." Throughout most of human history, the family has been a deliberate organization based on hierarchy and command, just as Hayek saw.  Parents--and particularly fathers--have exercised hierarchical command in planning the organization of the family for the collective ends of the whole family.
Recently, however, an increasing number of families in liberal societies have begun to look like spontaneous orders, in which parents and children pursuing their self-actualization act for their individually diverse ends, and thus there is little of the hierarchy and command that previously designed the family as a deliberate organization. 

Horwitz observes that if a liberal social order needs children to be socialized in their families to learn the bourgeois norms and habits of a liberal society--such as tolerance, self-control, taking responsibility for one's actions, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and learning from one's mistakes--one might doubt that a fully spontaneously ordered family can provide the socialization of children that is required for the spontaneous order of a liberal society to survive.  Oddly enough, the success of a liberal society as a spontaneous order might depend upon families that are not spontaneous orders but deliberate organizations designed by the central planning of parents for the proper socialization of children.

Some of these points are developed in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Do We Naturally Desire Eternal Life? Or Is the Natural Limit of 115 Years Enough?

Is it natural for us to want to live forever?  If that is so, is there any way to satisfy that natural desire--perhaps through a scientific conquest of nature or through a religious transition into an immortal afterlife?

Or should we see, as I have argued, that we can satisfy our natural desire for a complete life by living out our natural life span as set by our evolved human nature?

Against both the exaggerated optimism of some proponents of biotechnology (like Lee Silver and Gregory Stock) and the exaggerated pessimism of some critics (like Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama), I have argued (in Darwinian Conservatism and elsewhere) that our evolved human nature will always limit the uses of biotechnology, and that we can see this in how the natural human life span limits any biotechnological quest for ageless bodies.

Senescence--the process of bodily decay at older ages--is probably so deeply rooted in the adaptive complexity of our bodies as shaped by natural selection that it cannot be abolished by biotechnological changes.  It is likely that aging is controlled by so many genes interacting in such complex ways that it would be impossible to eliminate the genetic mechanisms for aging, and thus to greatly lengthen the life span, without disrupting other beneficial mechanisms.

The success of modern public health and medicine in extending life expectancy over the past 150 years has been cited as evidence by many people that if we continue in this direction, eventually we can conquer death completely.  And thus the dream of early modern scientists like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes of how modern science could make us such masters of nature that we might live forever would finally be fulfilled. 

But while we have increased the average length of life, we have not increased the maximum length of life. In contrast to the populations in previous centuries, in which few people lived past 60 or 70, most of us are living into our 80s and 90s.  And yet by age 100, 99 per cent of us will be dead; and by age 120, we will all be dead.  The maximum life span is the same today as it has been for thousands of years.  This confirms the wisdom of God's declaration in the Bible: "My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he is also flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years" (Genesis 6:3).

That was my argument in 2005 in Darwinian Conservatism, and now there is new research supporting that argument in the current issue of Nature (October 6, 2016).  Carl Zimmer has written an article about this for The New York Times.  Jan Vijg and his colleagues have shown that demographic data suggest that there is a natural limit to the human lifespan of about 115 years.  (This confirms the position of S. Jay Olshansky and his colleagues, whose work I cited in 2005.)  Their hypothesis is that if there is no biological limit to the human lifespan, then with improvements in public health, nutrition, and medical treatment, the age group experiencing the greatest increase in survival should be shifting to ever-older groups over time.  They found that the age with greatest improvement in survival got steadily higher over most of the twentieth century, but then it reached a plateau at about 99 in 1980.

They also looked at the age of the oldest person to die in a given year in France, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.  They saw that this increased rapidly between the 1970s and the early 1990s, but then plateaued in the mid-1990s at 114.9 years.  The longest lived human being whose age could be verified was Jeanne Calment who died in France in 1997 at age 122.  But she is an extreme outlier, as indicated by the fact that no one else since 1997 has been verified as living that long.  The oldest known person living today is Emma Morano, aged 116.  This also suggests a natural human lifespan of about 115.

Here we see one of the stunning achievements of liberalism: for the first time in human history, because of the Great Enrichment of the past 150 years, human beings today in liberal social orders have a good chance of living out their natural human lifespan.

Some scientists--like James Vaupel--have raised objections to this idea that there is a natural limit to the lifespan.  The first objection is that even if the age experiencing the greatest increase in survival has plateaued in many countries, it has not yet plateaued in some countries like Japan.  The second objection is that Vijg's demographic research ignores the possibility that future medical research could find new ways to increase maximum lifespan. 

It's hard to respond to such objections that depend upon unpredictable future developments.  But one can say that so far there is no clearly confirmed way for medical science to extend the human lifespan.  One can also say that this is unlikely to happen in the future if the lifespan is controlled by too many genes.

The religious believer in immortality could object, however, that this debate is about only one way to achieve immortality--staying alive indefinitely through scientific technology.  There are two other possibilities proposed by religious believers--immortality through the separation at death of the immortal soul from the mortal body or through the resurrection of the dead body to a deathless body.  Many orthodox Christians combine both forms of immortality, because they believe that at the death of the human body the human soul lives in an afterlife, and then when Jesus returns to Earth, the dead human bodies will be resurrected and reunited with the immortal souls.

Some of my critics--like Peter Lawler--have objected that human beings will never be satisfied with living out their natural human lifespans, and that it is only the prospect of achieving the immortality of body and soul in Heaven or Hell that will satisfy the natural human desire for eternal life.

I am skeptical about whether this is possible or desirable.  Is it possible for my personal identity to live forever as an immortal soul separated from any body or as a resurrected body that never ages?  Would it be desirable to live forever if living timelessly and changelessly would not be really living a human life? Would it be desirable to live forever in an afterlife if most human beings are condemned to eternal punishment in Hell? Or should we assume, as many Christians today do, that all human beings will go to Heaven?

Should we agree with Wallace Stevens that "death is the mother of beauty"?  Does this arise from our evolved human nature as embodied minds that pass through a natural life cycle from birth to maturity to death?

Here, however, is where Leo Strauss and his students object that most human beings cannot live with "the most terrible truth" that "nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable" (Liberalism Ancient and Modern, viii, 81, 83, 85, 92, 96, 100, 122-26, 134-35).  Insofar as liberalism embraces evolutionary science, it teaches that not only must all individual human beings die, but even the human species as a whole and the cosmic order of the Earth that makes human life possible must die.  Although this is a scientific truth of evolution, this is a deadly truth that promotes nihilism.  Only philosophers can live with this truth, and so they must hide it from everyone else.

Friedrich Nietzsche accepted evolutionary science in his middle writings--particularly, Human, All Too Human--and argued for a Darwinian aristocratic liberalism based on the truth that "everything has evolved."  Strauss and the Straussians are largely silent about this, because they agree with the Nietzsche of the later writings who saw evolutionary liberalism as a deadly nihilism that must be overcome through a new Dionysian myth that will eternalize human experience by affirming the "eternal basic text of Homo natura." Not death but eternity is the mother of beauty.

Some of these points have been developed in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here., here., and here.

"The Evolution of Liberalism" at George Mason University, October 15

On October 15th, I will be at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.  I will be leading a discussion for the "Hidden Hand Seminar" of the "Adam Smith Program" directed by Daniel Klein.

The title for my comments is "The Evolutionary Science of Smithian and Hayekian Liberalism."

The seminar will meet at 4:00-5:45 pm in Mason Hall D180.  The seminar is cosponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and the John Templeton Foundation.