Part 3 of "The Evolution of Human Progress Through the Liberal Enlightenment"

5. WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE CAUSE OF HUMAN PROGRESS?

Readers of Bailey and Tupy's book can see suggestions about four possible causes of human progress.  Two are explicitly stated by them--inclusive institutions and bourgeois ideas.  Two others are implied--the military success of liberal regimes and the evolved natural desire for freedom.  All four causes jointly contribute to the convergent evolution of liberal free-market democracies as the best social order.

Inclusive institutions.  At the beginning of their book (3), Bailey and Tupy embrace the argument of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their 2012 book--Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty--which turns on the contrast between "inclusive institutions" and "extractive institutions."  Acemoglu and Robinson have adopted the institutionalist theory of Douglass North and his colleagues in Violence and Social Orders (2009).  And the contrast between inclusive and extractive institutions corresponds to the contrast made by North and his colleagues between "open access societies" and "limited access societies."  (I have written about Violence and Social Orders here.)

Since the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the establishment of bureaucratic states, most societies have had extractive institutions through which a few ruling elites extract resources from the multitude of people excluded from power.  Only in the last 300 years, have a few societies--beginning in Great Britain and in North America--developed inclusive economic and political institutions that distribute economic and political power widely.  Inclusive institutions such as property rights, the rule of law, free markets, and political freedom create incentives for innovation through evolution by "creative destruction"--economic and political entrepreneurs who innovate in profitable ways succeed, and those who do not fail.  These inclusive institutions have created the conditions for all the great improvements in human well-being--the progressive global trends--that Bailey and Tupy present in their book.

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in Great Britain created the world's first inclusive institutions, which became the turning point in human history towards modern liberal social orders.  In the Glorious Revolution, King James II was forced off the throne by the Whig revolutionaries, who then invited William and Mary to take the throne under the condition that they accept Parliament's Declaration of Rights, which ended divine right monarchy and established the supremacy of Parliament as representing a broad coalition of economic and political groups.  This liberal Whig movement was supported by a coalition of merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groups.  New merchants and businessmen wanted free markets that allowed for innovative creative destruction in ways that would benefit them.  Eventually, this led to the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the 18th century, and then to the Great Enrichment, beginning in the 19th century.

North and his colleagues emphasize the importance for the new open access orders of the general laws of incorporation enacted in Great Britain and the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.  These laws allowed citizens to form corporations with legally stipulated rights and duties through procedures for registration and minimal conditions impersonally applied.  What previously was an elite privilege was openly available based on impersonal standards for registration as a corporation.  This created open entry to forming economic, social, and political organizations that were free to compete with one another.

In this way, inclusive or open access institutions allow creative political, economic, and social destruction through competition, in which successful enterprises proliferate and failed enterprises are eliminated.  Society secures open access to organizations as vehicles for political, economic, and social entrepreneurs to compete in implementing their ideas.  Such free competition in social experimentation allows a social order to achieve adaptive efficiency in responding to new and unpredictable challenges.

Bourgeois ideas.  Even if Acemoglu, Robinson, and North are right about the importance of inclusive or open access institutions as the necessary conditions for the modern liberal social order, we might still wonder whether Deirdre McCloskey is right in arguing that this is not sufficient to explain the uniqueness of the Great Enrichment, which required an intellectual change in ideas.  The triumph of liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life--a commercial way of life--could be seen as virtuous.  Bailey and Tupy apparently accept this point when they endorse McCloskey's point about the need for "major ideological shifts" (3-4).

In their account of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as initiating the turn to inclusive institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson rely on Steven Pincus' history--1688: The First Modern Revolution--which argues that this political revolution was a revolutionary transformation that prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution.  But Acemoglu and Robinson ignore Pincus' stress on the importance of the Whig ideas of John Locke and other writers in driving the revolutionary resistance to the Stuart monarchy and in shaping the Glorious Revolution into a modern revolution that established a "bourgeois culture."  What McCloskey identifies as bourgeois ideas are actually the Lockean ideas of natural human liberty and equality--the moral ideas that constitute and sustain the inclusive institutions that have promoted modern human progress.  (I have written about this here and here.)

Might makes right.  Because of his involvement in conspiracies for violent revolution, Locke was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being beheaded by the King, like Algernon Sydney and other radical Whig theorists.  Locke saw appeals to natural right as ultimately appeals to the force of arms--the "appeal to Heaven"--so that disagreements over right are settled by conspiratorial violence and military conflict.  Contrary to the common belief that the Glorious Revolution was a bloodless revolution, there were many violent clashes in the revolution; and the revolution would have failed if the military forces of James II had defeated the military forces of William II.

Acemoglu and Robinson recognize this point, and they note that even as late as 1746 the revolution could have been overturned by the Jacobite rising if the army of Charles Edward Stuart had not been defeated at the battle of Culloden in Scotland.  This shows, they observe, that the history of inclusive institutions has often been decided by the contingencies of warfare.

Bailey and Tupy also seem to recognize this when they note that "confrontations between extractive and inclusive regimes, such as World War II and the Cold War, have generally been won by the latter," because "liberal free-market democracies are resilient in ways that enable them to forestall or rise above the kinds of shocks that destroy brittle extractive regimes" (4).  Do they mean to suggest here that liberal regimes will always prevail in military conflicts with illiberal regimes?  If Hitler had not committed the blunder of attacking the Soviet Union in June of 1941, which forced the German armies to fight on two fronts--western and eastern--is it possible that Nazi Germany might have won the war and thus turned the tide of history towards illiberal regimes?

Or can the assertion of natural rights in Lockean liberalism be grounded in the natural human propensity to forceful resistance to oppression and tyranny, so that it really is true that might makes right?  (I have written about this here, here, and here.)

The evolved natural desire for freedom.  If inclusive institutions have caused the global human progress surveyed by Bailey and Tupy, and if "inclusive institutions are similar to one another in their respect for individual liberty" (3), then the ultimate cause of this progress would seem to be liberty.  That this is so can be confirmed by the fact that the "Human Freedom Index" correlates with all of the progressive trends towards increasing human well-being: the free societies tend to be the societies were human life is flourishing.  (I have written about the "Human Freedom Index" here.)

The universal appeal of freedom is perhaps most clearly manifested in what Francis Fukuyama in 1989 called "the end of history."  History as the human search for the fully satisfying social order has come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger, and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the final form of government.  Bailey and Tupy see this as Trend 8--"Democracy on the March."  The proportion of countries with autocratic governments has declined, while the proportion with democratic governments has risen.

One possible explanation for this is offered by Spinoza in The Theological-Political Treatise, perhaps the first full defense of modern liberal democracy.  He declared that the democratic state is "the most natural state," because it approaches most nearly the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.

Darwinian evolutionary psychology can confirm this by showing that the social life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors manifests the individual liberty and equality that liberal theorists have attributed to the state of nature.  And therefore the liberal conception of government as instituted among men to secure the individual rights that first arose in the state of nature might indeed be "the most natural state."

Foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over them.  So the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states (with extractive or limited access institutions) can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.

This kind of Darwinian liberal thinking is suggested in the writings of people like Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner, Paul Rubin, Christopher Boehm, and Christian Welzel.

Evolutionary Group Selection for Freedom Through Migration and Assimilation: Responding to Nicholas Wade

I have often argued that cultural group selection through migration and assimilation favors Lockean liberal regimes.  Human beings "vote with their feet" in that they tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, and more just societies.  And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice.  Beginning in the 18th century, classical liberal regimes based on Lockean political thought--like Great Britain and the United States--have attracted immigrants because of the prosperity, peace, and justice that liberal regimes promote.   

This explains why John Locke argued for England having a policy of open borders and general naturalization of immigrants.  Some people objected to Locke's position by claiming that immigrants would not be assimilated into English society.  Locke responded by saying that once immigrants are naturalized,

they are then in interest as much our own people as any.  The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror's days and came over with him.  For 'tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners (1997, 325).

If immigrants do not speak English, that will impede their assimilation into English culture, but their children will speak English and thus become "perfect Englishmen."  After all, most Englishmen are descended from foreign ancestors.

Notice also that contrary to the claims of the illiberal nationalists, Lockean liberalism can recognize the importance of the national identities that distinguish one people from another, because here Locke recognizes the cultural identity of the English people as a distinct nation rooted in the English language and other cultural traditions that have emerged from the cultural history of England.

Evolutionary theorists--such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson--have seen that Locke was right about immigration, and that cultural group selection working through selective migration and assimilation has favored the spread of Lockean liberal culture around the world (Boyd & Richerson 2009; Richerson & Boyd 2008).  This confirms what I have argued in various posts about the evolutionary history of Lockean liberalism as symbolic niche construction.

But against this, Nicholas Wade warns--in his new book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations--that when immigrants fail to assimilate into their new society, they create a cultural diversity that weakens the social cohesion necessary for any stable social order.

Social cohesion is inevitably weakened by any influx of people who don't share the socially bonding attributes of the residents, such as language, religion, and ethnicity.  And the weakening of social cohesion is deeply feared, even if at a level that many people cannot articulate, because it undermines the strength of a society and hence the chances of its members' survival (173).

Here Wade repeats one of the primary arguments made by nationalist conservatives like Yoram Hazony and J.D. Vance for why immigration needs to be severely restricted.

But where's the evidence that most immigrants cannot or will not assimilate and therefore threaten social cohesion?  Wade's only evidence for this is a study by Robert Putnam (2007).  Putnam wanted to study how the cultural diversity in the United States caused by immigration might affect "social capital" (defined as social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness).  He collected survey data from interviews of people living in 41 very different communities ranging from large cities like Los Angeles and Boston to small towns and rural areas like Yakima, Washington, and rural South Dakota.  People were asked "Do you trust the people in your neighborhood?"  He found that people living in ethnically homogeneous communities (like Lewiston, Maine) were more trusting of their neighbors than were people living in ethnically heterogeneous communities (like San Francisco).  He also found that people in ethnically diverse communities were less likely to volunteer to work on community projects than were people in ethnically homogeneous communities.

Putnam summarized his conclusions in a passage quoted by Wade:

Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. . . . Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us (Putnam 2007:150-151; Wade 2025:174).

But notice Putnam's qualification suggested by the phrase "at least in the short run."  In fact, much of Putnam's paper is devoted to arguing that in the long run, "successful immigrant societies have overcome . . . fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities" (137).

Wade casually dismisses this side of Putnam's argument: "Though Putnam expressed the hope that in the long run the negative effects of diversity would disappear, his work provided a frank and rare description of the formidable problems raised by immigration" (174).  But Putnam didn't just express the "hope" that this could be done, because he surveyed some of the evidence from the history of American immigration during the period of almost open borders--from around 1820 to around 1920--that showed immigrants assimilating into American society.  Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics, Russian Jews, and others were integrated into an American society that had once been a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)-dominated society.  In the short run, the first generation of immigrants tended to "hunker down" in their own cultural enclaves, set apart from the dominant American culture.  But in the long run, the children and grandchildren of these first-generation immigrants assimilated into American culture or into a new more expansive American identity that could include Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish Americans, and other hyphenated Americans.

Wade concedes that the many European immigrants--Irish, German, Southern, and Eastern Europeans--who arrived in America before World War I "assimilated, at least by the second generation, to their new community," and consequently there was "a high degree of cohesion" (179, 209).  "But cohesion has ebbed significantly over the last half century," Wade claims.  "Rising and more visible gaps in wealth, high fluxes of immigration with poor assimilation, and the advent of identity politics have stretched and torn the social fabric" (209).  Wade thus implies that over the past fifty years, the children of immigrants are no longer assimilating into American culture as they did a hundred years ago.

But Wade offers no evidence for this claim.  And in fact, there is lots of evidence against it.  For example, Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (2022, 2024) have used historical US Census data to show that the socioeconomic assimilation of immigrants through upward mobility is just as possible for immigrants today as it was in the early 20th century.  In the late 19th and early 20th century, sons born to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution (the income level below which 25 percent of individuals earn) rose to the 40th percentile as adults on average.  Most children of immigrants performed much better as adult earners--with children of immigrant Portuguese or Italian parents reaching the 60th percentile as adults.  A hundred years later, we see the same pattern.  Sons (or daughters) born in 1980 to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution reach just above the 45th percentile (for sons) and 40th percentile (for daughters) as adults.  Children of immigrant parents do better than this.  Children of parents from Hong Kong, China, and India reach, on average, almost the 65th percentile as adults.  The second-generation of immigrants continue to assimilate into the American middle-class culture.

The most radical form of assimilation of immigrants is intermarriage across ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries (Drouhot and Nee 2019:181).  Intermarriage rates--immigrants marrying native Americans with different ethnic, racial, and religious identities--have been rising steadily since the 1980s in the United States.  Few Americans today remember the days in the 1950s when young men and women were expected to marry within their ethnic, racial, and religious groups.

Previously, I have written about the importance of assimilation through intermarriage for the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization that has made America a multiethnic nation--or what Frederick Douglass called "the composite nation."

In his earlier book--A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History--Wade argued that while "races are a way station on the path through which evolution generates new species. . . . the forces of differentiation seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage" (71).

But now there's another question at issue here: what exactly is motivating these immigrants to undertake the extraordinary sacrifices that come with their efforts to immigrate to the United States, Canada, and the European nation-states?  Wade's answer is that they are attracted by "Western culture," which can be a "common culture" for "people of all ethnicities and cultures" (210).  But he doesn't specify the meaning of that "Western culture" that attracts so many immigrants.

Wade does point, however, to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have called the "inclusive institutions" achieved first in the British Glorious Revolution of 1688--overturning the "extractive institutions" of the oppressive regimes that had dominated human history for so long--as the highest development of Western culture (Wade 2014:148, 193-196; Wade 2025:98-100).  Those "inclusive institutions"--impartial rule of law, property rights, personal freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, and limited government--sound like Lockean liberalism to me.  

So when immigrants "vote with their feet" for Western culture, they're voting for the Lockean liberal social order.  That's what I would identify as evolutionary group selection for freedom through migration and assimilation.

REFERENCES

Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2022. Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success. New York: PublicAffairs.

Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2024. "Immigrants and Their Children Assimilate into U.S. Society and the U.S. Economy, Both in the Past and Today." PNAS Nexus, pgae344.

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson. 2009. "Voting With Your Feet: Payoff Biased Migration and the Evolution of Group Beneficial Behavior." Journal of Theoretical Biology 257:331-339.

Drouhot, Lucas, and Victor Nee. 2019. "Assimilation and the Second Generation in Europe and America: Blending and Segregating Social Dynamics Between Immigrants and Natives." Annual Review of Sociology 45:177-199.

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

Putnam, Robert. 2007.  " E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 John Skytte Prize Lecture." Scandinavian Political Studies 30:137-174.

Richerson, Peter, and Robert Boyd. 2008. "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values." In Paul Zak, ed, Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, 107-141. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wade, Nicholas. 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. New York: Penguin Press.

Wade, Nicholas. 2025. The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations. New York: Harper.

Human Biodiversity (3): Nicholas Wade, Abraham Lincoln, and Racial Genetics

The debate over Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance reminds me of the debate over whether Abraham Lincoln was a racist.  In contrast to the myth of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, his critics insist, he was actually a racist and a white supremacist.  The reason for this debate is that while Lincoln affirmed the principle of the equal right to self-government as stated in the Declaration of Independence, he also acknowledged racial differences that might prevent the races from living together on terms of perfect social and political equality, which for his critics is an expression of his racist bigotry.  (This debate over Lincoln is well surveyed in John Barr's new book--Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present [LSU Press, 2014].)  Similarly, Wade rejects the racist assertion that any race is so superior to any other as to have the right to rule others, and yet he also recognizes racial differences that are genetic, which his critics condemn as racism.  The question in both debates is whether one can see the reality of racial differences without being a racist, or whether the only way to avoid the evil of racism is to deny that race is real.

My answer to this question is that one can recognize racial differences, such that races will not be equal in all respects, while also recognizing that all human beings are by their nature equal in their right to self-government, so that no one has the right to rule over others without their consent; and consequently one can condemn racism as a violation of that equal right to self-government.  This is clearly stated by Lincoln, and it's implicit in Wade's book.

In his speech on the Dred Scott decision (June 26, 1857), Lincoln noted that Stephen Douglas, his opponent, was appealing to "a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races."  He said that Douglas

"finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes ALL men, black as well as white; and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!  He will have it that they cannot be consistent else.  Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife.  I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone.  In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others" (Speeches and Writings, Library of America, 1:397-98).

He then went on to explain his interpretation of the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration of Independence:

"I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects.  They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.  They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal--equal in 'certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'  This they said, and this meant.  They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (1:398).

In his speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act (October 16, 1854), Lincoln insisted that "the poor negro has some natural right to himself," and thus he has a natural right to self-government rooted in the human nature of self-ownership.  "My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own, lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me."  He denied Douglas's claim that the right of self government gave people in the western territories of the United States the right to vote for becoming slave states.

"The doctrine of self government is right--absolutely and eternally right--but it has no just application, as here attempted.  Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man.  If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self government, do just as he pleases with him.  But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?  When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism.  If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that 'all men are created equal;'  and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another" (1:328).

He concluded that the principle of self-government is grounded in the idea that "no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent."

So while Lincoln recognized that human beings are naturally unequal in many respects, including racial differences, he also saw that they are equal in those minimal emotional and intellectual capacities that sustain a moral sense and thus identify them as members of the human species.  This understanding of human equality requires not equality as identity but equality as reciprocity:  although unequal in many ways, all normal human beings will resist exploitation, will claim ownership in themselves and their property, and will demand social cooperation based on mutual consent to reciprocal exchange.

He argued: "This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave" (2:19).  "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master" (1:484).  Thus did Lincoln capture the logic of equality supporting republican government.  Human beings are unequal in many respects.  But our natural resistance to exploitation is such that no normal person would consent to be a slave, and so no one can consistently seek mastery based on any principle of superiority without exposing himself to being enslaved against his will.  Lincoln reasoned:

"If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B--why may not B snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?--

"You say A is white, and B is black.  It is color, then;  the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker?  Take care.  By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.

"You do not mean color exactly?--You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them?  Take care again.  By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.

 "But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another.  Very well.  And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you" (1:303).

As I have argued in some previous posts, there is a Darwinian logic against slavery and for the classical liberal principle of equal liberty that runs through Lincoln's reasoning as well as Charles Darwin's own opposition to slavery.  Slavery is a form of social parasitism, and human beings are naturally evolved to detect and resist parasitic exploitation.  As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (in Why Nations Fail) have argued, slavery was an integral part of the "extractive institutions" by which elites have exploited those under their rule, and it was the aim of liberal thought to replace such bad institutions with the good "inclusive institutions" that are responsible for the prosperity and liberty of the modern world.  (What they call "inclusive institutions" corresponds closely to what Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast would call "open access societies," which was the subject of a previous post.)

Although he doesn't elaborate the point as clearly as Lincoln, Wade does at least implicitly embrace this same Darwinian logic for equal liberty and against racist exploitation.

At the beginning of his book, however, Wade tries to evade the moral and political implications of his scientific reasoning about racial evolution in human history.  He does this by invoking the is/ought dichotomy.  He claims: "Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science.  Science is about what is, not what ought to be.  Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there" (7).  If that were true, then morality and politics would belong to a normative realm of moral values that transcends the empirical realm of natural facts studied by science.  But is this really true?  If science were to discover that some races were genetically adapted for slavery, so that they were naturally inclined to serve their masters and never to resist their exploitation, wouldn't this provide empirical evidence that the enslavement of such races is right? 

In fact, some of the proponents of slavery in the nineteenth century argued that the African race was biologically adapted for slavery, and that this race was actually a separate species.  One of the main motivations for Darwin's writing of The Descent of Man was to refute this claim.  He recognized the many differences--both physical and mental--between the races, and yet he saw the fundamental similarity--including the moral sense--that showed that all the races belonged to one human species.

Wade agrees with this.  "Human nature is essentially the same worldwide" (244).  While racial science shows that some races have "relative advantages in some traits" in some environments over other races, there is no evidence that any race is "superior in any absolute sense," which is "the essence of racism" (8, 250).  "The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others.  The superior race is assumed to enjoy the right to rule others because of its inherent qualities" (17).  This premise is false.  "People being so similar, no one has the right or reason to assert superiority over a person of different race" (9).

Notice how Wade here violates his fact/value dichotomy.  The fact of people being similar supports the value condemning racism.  Notice also the implicit logic of Darwinian liberalism that allows for the free expression of individual and racial differences, while denying that anyone claiming racial superiority has the right to rule others without their consent.

Wade's Darwinian liberalism becomes clear in his endorsement of the argument of Acemoglu and Robinson on the need to move from "extractive institutions" to "inclusive institutions" (Wade, 148-49, 175, 180, 193-96).  Inclusive institutions are more innovative, more productive, more peaceful, and therefore better institutions, because they are based on the liberal principle that the right of self-government belongs equally to all human beings.

As Wade indicates, the move to inclusive liberal institutions must overcome tribalism, which is the instinctive xenophobic propensity to favor one's own group over others.  Racism is an expression of such tribalism, in favoring one's race over others.  Here one can see clearly why Wade's argument is not racist: at the core of his argument is his claim that the tribalism of racial ethnocentrism belongs to an ancient stage of human evolution that has to be overcome to move into modern states and inclusive institutions (see 136, 173-82, 196-97).

Lincoln saw racial tribalism as the deepest obstacle to achieving "perfect social and political equality."  The disgust elicited by racial intermarriage was one powerful expression of such tribalist bigotry.  Eliminating such bigotry might require promoting racial intermarriage so that racial differences would eventually disappear.  It is altogether fitting and proper, therefore, that on the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth in 2009, President Barack Obama spoke at the Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois.

Wade indicates that if human racial differentiation were to continue at the same rate as it has for the past 50,000 years, the human races at some time in the future could become separate species.  But this is unlikely to happen in modern inclusive societies, because "the forces of differentiation seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage" (71).  For example, African Americans share a high proportion of their genomes with Europeans (101).  The final triumph of inclusive institutions might be ever extensive racial intermarriage so that racial differences would disappear, and consequently racial tribalism would be extinguished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But DR thinks this is all wrong.

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

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

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

DR objects:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deirdre McCloskey and the Evolutionary Science of Liberalism as Symbolic Niche Construction

The most momentous event in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens over the past 200,000 years was the emergence of the Bourgeois Era through the Industrial Revolution (beginning around 1800) followed by the Great Enrichment (beginning around 1860).  The only other equally momentous event was the emergence of the Agrarian Era, when human beings moved from foraging (hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants) to farming (herding domesticated animals and cultivating domesticated plants), which began about 10,000 years ago.

We all recognize the importance of the Industrial Revolution, but few of us recognize that economic historians have uncovered other industrial revolutions at other times and places in history.  Those other industrial revolutions did not bring a Great Enrichment--the explosive growth in wealth sustaining an explosive growth in population over the past two centuries, beginning in northwestern Europe and then spreading around the world.  One of the deepest questions for all of the intellectual disciplines--the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--is how to explain why this has happened.  Or, in other words, why is our world in the Bourgeois Era so very different from the world of all of our ancestors?

Bourgeois Equality (2016) is the third big book in a trilogy of big books that Deirdre McCloskey has written to answer this question.  The previous two are The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and Bourgeois Dignity (2010).  All three books elaborate arguments that were first set forth in 1994 in an article--"Bourgeois Virtue"--in the American Scholar, written by Donald McCloskey before he became Deirdre.  Every main idea, and sometimes even the exact wording, in the books comes from the article.

The plan for this intellectual project came to McCloskey while she was on an airplane and reading John Casey's book Pagan Virtue (1990).  As suggested by Friedrich Nietzsche, Casey contrasts the pagan aristocratic virtues of Achilles, for whom courage is the primary virtue, and the plebeian Christian virtues of Saint Paul, for whom charity is the primary virtue.  Today, McCloskey thought, most of us are bourgeois, and we are neither pagan aristocrats nor Christian plebeians.  We are neither heroes nor saints.  What are our bourgeois virtues?  Or must we admit, as Gustav Flaubert and other bohemian critics of the bourgeois have declared, that the only way for the bourgeois to become good is to stop being bourgeois?  Bourgeois liberalism has allowed more human beings to enjoy individual liberty, equal dignity, and economic prosperity than ever before in the history of the world.  Prior to 1800, most people everywhere lived in grinding poverty.  Now, few people live in such poverty.  Surely, there must be something good in that, something virtuous.

The greatness of the Great Enrichment is evident in the economic data.  McCloskey summarizes some of the data from economic historians (like Angus Maddison) and from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Penn Tables (put together by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania) (Bourgeois Equality, 5-13).  Expressed in present-day U.S. prices, corrected for exchange rates and inflation, the average human being prior to 1800 lived on $3 a day, which is the average today for Haitians and Afghans.  Today, the world average, which includes the poorest people like the Haitians and Afghans, is $33 a day, which is about the level of present-day Brazil or of the United States in 1941.  So average per person income has increased over the past two centuries by a favor of 10.  And since the world population has increased over that same period from under one billion to over seven billion, we can say that the production and consumption of goods and services has increased worldwide by a factor of 70 (7 X 10).  In the wealthier countries today, the average real income per person per day is well over $100, which means an income growth from 1800 to the present of 2,900%.

Prior to 1800, periods of increasing economic growth could double or triple average daily income--from $3 a day to $6 or $9 a day--but inevitably these periods of growth were followed by a decline back to subsistence levels.  So, prior to 1800, real income per person could increase by 100% or 200% in times of great economic growth, but never by 2,900%, as has happened in the past two centuries.

McCloskey contends that the greatest transformation in human history was not the 450 years of sustained economic growth in England, 1348-1750, at a growth rate of one-tenth or two-tenths of 1 percent per year.  And it was not the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, 1760-1860, with growth over a hundred years of a factor of 2.  The great transformation was the Great Enrichment, with growth of 5.87% per year and a factor of 100 over two centuries (BE, 532).  There had been major growth phases in earlier history elsewhere in the world--early Song China and early Tokugawa Japan, for example--but these were periods in which growth rose by factors of 2 or 3, not factors of 10 or 30 or 100 (BE, 534-35).

Moreover, other measures of improving human conditions of life show the same Great Enrichment.  Average life expectancies have doubled since 1800, for example, and literacy has increased from less than 10% in 1850 to almost 90% today.  The increase in literacy indicates not just material enrichment, but also intellectual and spiritual enrichment.

Social scientists have offered many different kinds of explanations for this unprecedented turn in human history, beginning first in northwestern Europe and North America, and then spreading around the world.  One explanation popular with many economists (such as Douglass North, Daron Acemoglu, and James Robinson) emphasizes the importance of economic, legal, and political institutions that favor economic growth--particularly, property rights, the rule of law, free trade, and general incorporation laws for forming economic corporations, which provided the incentives for economic exchange and innovation.

But while such institutional rules are necessary conditions for economic growth, McCloskey argues, they are hardly sufficient to explain the historically unique explosion in economic development that began after 1800.  Good institutions are necessary, but only quick changes in good ideas can explain the quick move to the Great Enrichment.  Ideas matter, McCloskey insists, particularly ethical ideas about the  bourgeois life.  What changed in the eighteenth century in Great Britain (preceded by the same change in the seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic) was that for the first time in human history the bourgeois life of trade-tested betterment--buying low and selling high--was judged not as morally corrupting, as it had been throughout history, but as morally virtuous and thus honorable.

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have expressed the bourgeois "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," which has fostered economic growth.  But it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northwestern Europe that philosophers like Adam Smith defended this as a virtuous activity that should be admired as protected by a system of natural liberty that would recognize the equal liberty and dignity of ordinary people in living their lives as they please.  This change in the ethical rhetoric of ideas brought the Great Enrichment of the nineteenth century.  This change was the move to liberalism, to Smith's liberal idea for "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 664, 687).

The institutions of property rights, the rule of law, and free trade can be found in many civilizations throughout human history.  For example, as McCloskey points out, Genghis Khan's Pax Mongolia of the thirteenth century enforced property rights and the rule of law over a land empire stretching from Korea to Hungary, which protected global free trade throughout Central Asia.  China had private property, extensive markets, and large firms many centuries before England had such institutions.  Even ancient Mesopotamia had property rights and trade protected by law four thousand years ago.  What all of these countries lacked, however, was the bourgeois ethics of Smithian liberalism that led to the Great Enrichment beginning in nineteenth century Great Britain.

Institutions without ideas are not enough to explain this.  In fact, as McCloskey points out (BE, 518), even institutionalists like North will occasionally admit this.  In Violence and Social Orders (2009) by North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, there is one passage (pp. 192-93) where the authors must fall back on ideational explanation for the transition to "open access societies": they speak of a "transformation in thinking," a "new understanding," "the language of rights," and "the logic of the argument."  But then they fail to reflect on how this points to the primacy of liberal ideas advanced by people like John Locke and Adam Smith.

If McCloskey is right about the rhetorical appeal of liberal ideas promoting bourgeois ethics, as I think she is, then we must wonder what it is about evolved human nature that makes such ideas rhetorically appealing.  Generally, McCloskey scorns evolutionary science in explaining social and economic history, because she fears that this falls into a crude social Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenic materialism, which she sees, for example, in Gregory Clark's explanation of the British Industrial Revolution as arising from "survival of the richest" (Bourgeois Dignity, 266-95).

McCloskey also says, however, that her argument can be put into "evolutionary terms," because "I am arguing that the meme 'trade-tested-betterments are good' had reproductive success, and further, that on the success of the idea depended the material success of the modern world" (BE, 521-22).  This would be a case of cultural evolution, of the sort studied by evolutionary scientists like Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich.  Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have shown that in evolutionary history there are four systems of inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.  Of these four, the first three are manifest among nonhuman animals.  Symbolic evolution is the one uniquely human line of evolutionary inheritance, which includes the whole realm of conceptual ideas and rhetorical persuasion.  What McCloskey identifies as the Bourgeois Revaluation in liberalism belongs to human symbolic evolution.

McCloskey (BE, 631-39) also embraces an evolutionary theory of liberalism set forth in a paper by Gerald Gaus (2015), who relies largely on ideas developed by Christopher Boehm (1999, 2012) and by Richerson and Boyd (2008).  This is the same evolutionary account of liberalism that has been defended by Jonathan Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Paul Rubin, and me (in various writings as well as on this blog).

The basic idea, as McCloskey says, is that bourgeois liberalism is "reinstating a pre-agricultural equality" by establishing an equal dignity and liberty for ordinary people--including an "equality of genuine comfort"--that restores the equal autonomy of individuals enjoyed in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years until the establishment of rigid class hierarchies in agrarian societies. 

As I have argued in some earlier posts, this is a restatement of John Locke's argument for liberalism as the restoration of the natural liberty and equality that hunter-gatherers had in the "state of nature."  Locke's account of the state of nature depended on the reports of Europeans about the foraging life of native Americans.  "In the beginning," Locke declared, "all the world was America."  Now, after two centuries of scientific studies of the foraging way of life, we can confirm Locke's account of the state of nature as mostly right.  And we can see that the modern liberal ideas of equality, liberty, and dignity can be understood as appealing to that evolved human nature as shaped in the hunter-gatherer bands of our evolutionary ancestors.

And yet, one might object that, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out in his evolutionary account of liberalism, the liberalism of the Great Society--of the extended order of exchange in which millions of people can cooperate anonymously for their mutual benefit--requires a repression of the natural instincts shaped by life in ancient families and small bands.  In those families and foraging bands, our ancestors lived in primitive communism, just as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels recognized, in which wealth was distributed equally for the common good according to some deliberate plan.  By contrast to this, a modern free market society requires that goods and services be distributed through market prices, which does not conform to any standard of social justice.  The socialist rejection of the market system of allocation in favor of a deliberately planned distribution for the common good appeals to our evolved instincts for the socialism of families and small bands.

In fact, McCloskey observes, our families "are little socialist economies," and the "instinctive basis" for wanting a centrally planned society is that central planning really does work in a family household, and perhaps also in small bands and small business firms (BE, 577, 624).  Moreover, McCloskey notes, the family can rightly be seen as the original social insurance scheme to provide care for children, the sick, the unemployed, and the old (BE, 605).  The problem, however, is that while it is natural for a family or a band to be centrally planned according to the communist principle of  "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," it is not natural for large societies of millions of individuals to be centrally planned; and in such large societies, we need life to be organized by trade.

According to Hayek, this means that in large liberal societies, we must live in two worlds at once that are based on conflicting principles of order.  We must neither apply the rules of the market to family life, nor apply the rules of family life to the market.  Hayek explained: "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 (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it.  Yet if we were 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 world at once" (The Fatal Conceit, 18).

But as Gaus and I and a few others have argued, Hayek is mistaken in his belief that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a completely socialist or collectivist order with no individual autonomy, and therefore our evolved human nature must be suppressed if we are to live in a free society of autonomous individuals who trade with one another for mutual benefit.  In fact, as McCloskey indicates, there is plenty of evidence for long-distance trading networks among our ancient foraging ancestors (BE, 22, 106-107, 283, 376, 403, 543-59).  Even Hayek himself sometimes concedes that there is evidence for ancient trading (Fatal Conceit, 11, 16-17, 29, 38-45, 60, 133). 

Moreover, there is also evidence, as Boehm and others have shown, that foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over others.  If this is so, then the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.


REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 2015. "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism." Journal of Bioeconomics 17:3-15.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Gaus, Gerald. 2015. "The Egalitarian Species." Social Philosophy and Policy 31: 1-27.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion Lamb. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Maryanski, Alexandra, and Jonathan Turner. 1992. The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2008. "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values." In Paul J. Zak, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, 107-41. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rubin, Paul H. 2002. Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origins of Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Turner, Jonathan H., and Alexandra Maryanski. 2008.  On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Elaboration of some of my points here can be found in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here, here, here, here., here., here., here, and here.