Leon Kass's Bioethics in Darwinian Liberal Education

 

DARWINIAN LIBERAL EDUCATION

Kass’s richer “more natural science” of his early writings supports a richer public bioethics as part of a Darwinian liberal education that unifies all intellectual disciplines—the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities—within the unifying framework of Darwinian evolutionary science.  The aim of liberal education is to probe all the fields of intellectual inquiry to understand how the complex interaction of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual choices shapes the course of human experience within the cosmic order of nature.  Darwinian science provides a general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the scientific study of the evolution of life within the evolution of the universe (Arnhart 2006).

          Kass’s primary contribution to this Darwinian liberal education has been in developing what he has called “a richer bioethics, one that recognizes and tries to do justice to the deep issues of our humanity raised by the age of biotechnology” (Kass 2005:221).  Kass agrees with the argument of John Evans that the public bioethical debate has become too “thin,” and that it needs to become “thicker” (Evans 2002).  Kass’s “richer” bioethics is what Evans would call a “thicker” bioethics.  For bioethics to become richer or thicker, it must become part of a Darwinian liberal education, which became clear in the work of the President’s Council as led by Kass (Briggle 2010).

          Evans uses the metaphor of thick and thin to distinguish the substantive rationality of the bioethical debate from the late 1960s to the early 1970s and the formal rationality that came to dominate bioethics beginning in the late 1970s.  In the earlier period, the substantive rationality of the debates over biotechnology required that people argue about whether some technology such as human genetic engineering was consistent with ultimate values or ends, which required that people argue about those ultimate ends.  So, for example, a scientist promoting human genetic engineering might argue that this was the best means for achieving the ultimate end of human control of nature and human nature, so that human beings could engineer the perfection of their species by eliminating genetic defects and pursuing genetic enhancements.  But then a theologian might argue that this was “playing God,” in that man was trying to become his own self-creator and thus take the place of God the Creator, in violation of God’s ends.  There would then be a debate over which ultimate end should be higher—striving for a human God-like power over nature for human self-perfection or a humble and reverent acceptance of a God-given human nature with all its imperfections.  Since many conflicting ends could be considered in such debates, reaching agreement on which end should predominate was difficult if not impossible, so that the debates could become endless.  In this way, the substantive rationality of these debates was thick.

          By contrast, beginning in the late 1970s, bioethics became dominated by professional bioethicists—typically, academic philosophers and lawyers—who developed bioethics as a specialized field of study promoting an argumentation of formal rationality.  According to this view, any biotechnological means that maximized ends was ethical; and the ends were predetermined by consensus of the experts to be limited in number.  The ends were eventually reduced to four principles: personal autonomy (informed consent), beneficence (benefits greater than costs), nonmaleficence (avoiding harm), and justice (fair distribution of benefits, costs, and risks) (Beauchamp and Childress 2001).  It was assumed that these were universal ends to which all human beings could agree.  All other ends for which there was no universal agreement were excluded from the bioethical debates.  Once they had agreed to their four ends, bioethicists would only debate about calculating the best means to these four ends; and they saw no need to debate about ends other than these four.  In this way, the formal rationality of their debates was thin.

          Kass’s thicker or richer bioethics accepts the four principles adopted by the professional bioethicists—autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice.  But in his writings and in his work with the President’s Council, Kass has shown that a deep deliberation about bioethical issues must consider many important moral ends beyond these four principles; and because these many moral ends often conflict with one another, different people will come to different conclusions about how to weigh these ends.  The moral deliberation about these ends will often not reach consensus.

          For example, consider the debate over whether parents should be free to use stimulant drugs—such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) or Adderall (amphetamine)—to modify the behavior of children who are inattentive, impulsive, or hyperactive.  For thin bioethics, there might be only two principles for this debate—autonomy and nonmaleficence.  Are parents exercising their autonomy in giving these drugs to their children?  Are these drugs safe for the children?  If the answer to both questions is yes, then we should allow parents to use these psychotropic drugs in helping them to rear their children.

          But for the thick bioethics of the Beyond Therapy report, some important moral considerations have been passed over in silence.  For example, one crucial part of parental rearing of children is the moral education of children through shaping their moral character so that they are capable of self-control and behaving appropriately in society.  Will behavior-modifying drugs interfere with this moral education?  Will this teach children that good behavior is caused by chemistry, and that the responsibility for their conduct belongs not to themselves but to their pills?  Will this diminish their sense of moral agency? (President’s Council 2003a:87-92).  The thin bioethics of the professional bioethicists does not ask such questions.

          Furthermore, while thin bioethics requires only a narrowly specialized training—learning the four moral ends and how biotechnological means can maximize those ends—thick bioethics requires a broadly interdisciplinary liberal education that integrates the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in seeking wisdom about the conditions for a flourishing human life and how biotechnology might impede or promote that human flourishing.  That liberal education is best pursued, Kass believes, through reading and discussing the Great Books of the Western intellectual tradition.  One can see that in the anthology of 92 selected texts published by the President’s Council—Being Human: Readings from the President’s Council on Bioethics.  The authors of the texts include scientists (such as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Feynman, and James Watson), physicians (such as Hippocrates and Richard Selzer), philosophers (such as Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Thomas Hobbes), poets (such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman), and novelists (such as Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Willa Cather) (President’s Council 2003b).

          In its devotion to a bioethics rooted in liberal education, the President’s Council was different from the other five general federal bioethics commissions preceding it.  Those other commissions were concerned mostly with developing specific public policy proposals.  By contrast, the Kass Council made few policy proposals.  Kass has admitted that the Council has had “no demonstrable effect” on “specific policy issues.”  He conducted the Council’s meetings and supervised the Council’s reports to promote seminar-like discussions that allowed open debate about the moral and intellectual questions raised by bioethical disputes without ever reaching consensus.  He said that Beyond Therapy was “a purely educational work, with no policy recommendations.”  He explained that his primary goal was educational: he hoped that the published discussions and reports of the Council would be adopted as readings for college seminar courses on bioethics or for groups of ordinary citizens who wanted to discuss deep questions about the implications of biotechnology for human life (Kass 2005:229, 240-41, 244-47).

          We can see here that Kass’s educational goal is to revive the tradition of liberal education as a unification of all knowledge in the quest for wisdom about the meaning of our humanity, of our human nature within the natural order of the whole.  That unity of knowledge requires a unifying framework of thought.  There is today only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is Darwinian evolutionary science.

          Although Kass does not explicitly affirm this idea of a Darwinian liberal education, he does at least implicitly suggest it in some of his early writings and in some of the reports of the President’s Council.  For example, as we have seen, the Council’s report Beyond Therapy is organized around natural human desires—“desires for longer life, stronger bodies, sharper minds, better performance, happier souls, better children” (Kass 2005:235).  These natural desires are the “essential sources of concern” that set the standards for any moral assessment of biotechnology.  They constitute “what is naturally human,” “what is naturally and dignifiedly human.”  They are “naturally given” to us as inherent in our human nature.  If we seek the source of this gift, we find that our natural desires are “wondrous products of evolutionary selection,” because “the human body and mind” are “highly complex and delicately balanced as a result of eons of gradual and exacting evolution” (President’s Council 2003a:286-87).

          This unification of knowledge founded on evolutionary science suggests something like what Edward O. Wilson called “consilience” (Wilson 1998).  Wilson argued that the natural human desire to understand the world as an orderly whole was a quest for the fundamental unity of all knowledge.  This longing for a comprehensive knowledge of the whole began with ancient philosophers such as Thales and Aristotle.  It was renewed by the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Now, Wilson claimed, the progress in modern science has created the realistic prospect for satisfying this ancient longing by developing a web of causal explanations that would combine all the intellectual disciplines.  Crucial to this unification of knowledge is its foundation in evolutionary biology as explaining the nature of human beings and their place in the natural whole, including the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the present, which some historians now call Big History (Christian 2004; Christian, Brown, and Benjamin 2014).  Darwinian liberal education must encompass all of this.

 

THE NATURAL LIMITS OF BIOTECHNOLOGY

One objection to this pursuit of a Darwinian liberal education that studies an evolved human nature is that this assumes the stability of that human nature, even though we know now that biotechnology is giving us the power to change and even abolish that human nature.  After all, isn’t Kass’s bioethics driven by his fear that biotechnology can lead to what C. S. Lewis called “the abolition of man”?

          The problem with this objection, however, is that it shows how the power of biotechnology for changing human nature has been exaggerated (Arnhart 2003).  The most fervent advocates of biotechnology welcome the prospect of using it to transform our nature to make us superhuman.  The most fervent critics of biotechnology warn us that its power for transforming our nature will seduce us into a Faustian bargain that will dehumanize us.  Both sides agree that biotechnology is leading us to a “posthuman future” (Fukuyama 2002). 

This is a mistake.  It ignores how evolution has shaped the adaptive complexity of our human nature—our bodies, our brains, and our desires—in ways that resist technological manipulation.  A Darwinian view of human nature—one truer to the facts of human biology and human experience—reveals the limits of biotechnology, so that we can reject both the redemptive hopes of its optimistic advocates and the apocalyptic fears of its pessimistic critics.

          Biotechnology will be limited both in its technical means and in its moral ends.  It will be limited in its technical means because complex behavioral traits are rooted in the intricate interplay of many genes, which interact with developmental contingencies and unique life histories to form brains that respond flexibly to changing circumstances.  Consequently, precise technological manipulation of human nature to enhance desirable traits while avoiding undesirable side effects will be very difficult if not impossible.  Biotechnology will also be limited in its moral ends because the motivation for biotechnological manipulations will come from the same natural desires that have always characterized human nature.

          In Beyond Therapy, Kass and his Council recognized both these natural limits on biotechnology.  For example, they noted the technical limits to any attempt to use genetic engineering to design “better children”: “Growing recognition of the complexity of gene interactions, the importance of epigenetic and other environmental influences on gene expression, and the impact of stochastic events is producing a strong challenge to strict genetic determinism.  Straightforward genetic engineering of better children may prove impossible, not only in practice but even in principle.”  Consequently, “genetically engineered ‘designer babies’ are not in the offing” (President’s Council 2003a:38, 276).  They also recognized that biotechnology would be limited in its moral ends as set by the natural desires of evolved human nature, including those desires around which the whole discussion in Beyond Therapy is organized.

 

CONCLUSION

I have identified three problems in Leon Kass’s “richer bioethics.”  He contradicts himself when he shifts back and forth between his appeal to natural reason and his appeal to supernatural revelation—Athens and Jerusalem.  His attempt to develop a biblical bioethics fails because he Bible lacks the moral authority, the moral clarity, and the moral reliability required for settling debates over biotechnology.  In claiming that all modern science is blinded by a crudely reductionistic, mechanistic, and antiteleological understanding of nature, he fails to recognize how modern science sees the emergent complexity and teleological structure of life.

          Kass could avoid these problems by renewing his project for a “more natural science” in his early writings.  This expansive conception of modern science would support a Darwinian liberal education that could help us to think deeply and act morally in our modern world as shaped by modern science and technology.

          More broadly, Darwinian liberal education can help us understand our human place in nature.  We are neither mindless machines nor disembodied spirits.  We are animals.  As animals, we display the animate powers of nature for movement, desire, and awareness.  We move to satisfy our desires in the light of our awareness of the world.  We are a unique kind of animal, but our distinctively human traits—such as symbolic speech, practical deliberation, and conceptual thought—are emergent elaborations of powers shared in some form with other animals.  Our powers for habituation and learning allow us to alter our natural environments, but even these powers are emergent extensions of the behavioral flexibility shown by other animals.  So even if the natural world was not made for us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it.  We have not been thrown into nature from some place far away.  We come from nature.  It is our home.

 

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 2003. “Human Nature Is Here to Stay.” The New Atlantis, Number 2 (Summer): 65-78.

Arnhart, Larry. 2006. “Darwinian Liberal Education.”  Academic Questions 19 (Fall):6-18.

Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2001. Principles of Bioethics. 5^th edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Christian, David. 2004. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of Chicago Press.

Christian, David, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin. 2014. Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Evans, John H. 2002. Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Briggle, Adam. 2010. A Rich Bioethics: Public Policy, Biotechnology, and the Kass Council. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Kass, Leon. 2005. “Reflections on Public Bioethics: A View from the Trenches.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15:221-50.

President’s Council on Bioethics. 2003a. Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. Washington, DC: President’s Council on Bioethics.

President’s Council on Bioethics. 2003b. Being Human: Readings from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Washington, DC: President’s Council on Bioethics.

Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf.

Darwinian Liberal Education

My article on "Darwinian Liberal Education" will be published soon in the fall 2006 issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. Here I will provide a few excerpts.

We all know what's wrong with higher education today. Teaching and research have become so specialized, fragmented, and incoherent that we cannot see that unity of knowledge necessary for sustaining general or liberal eduction. To renew the tradition of the liberal arts, we need a new unifying framework of thought. As far as I can tell, there is today only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is Darwinian evolutionary biology.

I began to move towards this conclusion as an undergrduate student at the University of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration in his Metaphysics that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire that leads natural philosophers to search for the ultimate causes or reasons for all things. Fascinated by Aristotle's comprehensive investigation of nature and human nature, I noticed that much of his writing was in biology, and that even his moral and political works assumed a biological understanding of human nature. So I wondered whether Aristotle's biological naturalism could be compatible somehow with modern Darwinian biology, and whether this might support a general study of human life within the natural causal order of the whole.

Reading Leo Strauss helped me to see how the fundamental dilemma of modernity explained the loss of liberal education as a comprehensive study of the whole. The natural sciences assume a materialist reductionism that cannot account for the human mind or spirit. The humanities assume a radical dualism that treats human consciousness and conduct as autonomous in their separation from the causal order of the natural sciences. The social sciences are then torn between these two contradictory positions.

We might overcome this dilemma, I thought, if we could see Darwinian biology as a comprehensive science that would unify all the intellectual disciplines by studying human experience as part of the natural whole. This would continue the Aristotelian tradition of biology, because, as Strauss observed, Aristotle believed that biology could provide "a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man."

The aim of liberal education is to use all the intellectual disciplines to probe how the complex interaction of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual choices shapes the course of human experience within the order of nature. Darwinian theory provides a general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the scientific study of genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and cognitive judgment.

In my teaching and my research, I have tried to answer the intellectual objections to grounding liberal learning in Darwinian evolution. Those people who deny the truth of Darwinian science should be free to dispute it as best they can, while recognizing the weight of the evidence and arguments favoring it and the difficulty of developing alternative explanations that are scientifically testable. Those people who fear Darwinian reductionism should see how Darwinian biology recognizes the emergent evolution of complexity. Those people who fear Darwinism as morally subversive should see how Darwinian reasoning supports morality by rooting it in human nature. Those people who fear Darwinian atheism should see that Darwinian explanations leave open the question of whether the evolution of nature is ultimately the work of nature's God. At all of these points, a Darwinian pursuit of liberal education directs us to think about the fundamental questions of human existence in the world. Isn't that what a liberal education is supposed to do?

But still many people will object that integrating the liberal arts curriculum through the idea of Darwinian evolution is impracticable, because this would require a radical restructuring of academic procedures and institutions, which is unlikely. My response here is to suggest three small steps that we can take that don't require radical change.

The first step is for college and university teachers to develop courses in their departments that incorporate Darwinian ideas. Many professors are starting to do that, because they are finding that evolutionary theory offers them fruitful lines of research that they can introduce in their regular teaching. I teach courses in biopolitical theory at Northern Illinois University that attract students from many departments across the university.

The next step is for faculty members in different departments to cooperate in interdisciplinary teaching. Next year, I will be team-teaching a course on evolution with a philosopher and a biologist. Students will register in one of three coures in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Biological Sciences, or the Department of Philosophy. But the three classes with the three professors will meet together. We will explore the general ideas of evolutionary theory and then apply them to various topics crossing the fields of biology, philosophy, and political science. The different viewpoints of the three professors in each class will surely stimulate lively discussions.

A third step would be to expand this into a general curriculum that would bring together courses in many departments. The best model for this would be David Sloan Wilson's Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University. (The website for Wilson's program can be found here.) This program was started by Wilson in 2002, and it is already being adopted at other schools. He has designed an integrated curriculum with a required introductory course--"Evolution for Everyone"--and a list of courses across the university from which students must earn a minimum number of credits. Wilson teaches "Evolution for Everyone" as the course in which all students in the program are introduced to the central concepts of evolutionary theory as well as some illustrative application of those concepts to various fields of study. He emphasizes the application of evolutionary ideas to human nature. In addition to the undergraduate program, there is a similar program for graduate students with the same structure. In this way, both faculty and students from across Binghamton University in many different departments are brought together with Darwinian reasoning as their common language to talk about questions of human nature and the natural world.

At Northern Illinois University, I have helped to develop "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels within the Department of Political Science. With the help of my colleagues in other departments, I hope to eventually organize a university-wide program in evolutionary studies following the lead of Wilson's program at Binghamton.

Through such a Darwinian liberal education, we could renew the quest that began with Aristotle to satisfy our natural human desire to understand the causes or reasons for all things.

Darwinian Liberal Education

We should all know what's wrong with higher education today. Teaching and research have become so specialized, fragmented, and incoherent that we cannot see that unity of knowledge necessary for sustaining general or liberal education. To renew the tradition of the liberal arts, we need a new unifying framework of thought. As far as I can tell, there is today only one plausible source for such a common ground of knowledge, and that is Darwinian evolutionary biology.

I began to move towards this conclusion as an undergraduate student at the University of Dallas in the late 1960s. My youthful excitement about philosophy was stirred by Aristotle's declaration that all human beings by nature desire to understand, a desire tht leads natural philosophers to search for the ultimate causes or reasons for all things. Fascinated by Aristotle's comprehensive investigation of nature and human nature, I noticed that much of his writing was in biology, and that even his moral and political works assumed a biological understanding of human nature. So I wondered whether Aristotle's biological naturalism could be compatible somehow with modern Darwinian biology, and whether this might support a general study of human life within the natural causal order of the whole.

The aim of liberal education is to use all the intellectual disciplines to probe how the complex interaction of natural human propensities, cultural traditions, and individual choices shapes the course of human experience within the natural world. Darwinian theory provides a general conceptual framework for such liberal learning grounded in the scientific study of genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and cognitive judgement.

This Darwinian view of liberal education has guided my teaching. At Northern Illinois University, I helped to organize "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of Political Science. Some of the courses in the program are cross-listed as biology courses. So my undergraduate courses typically enroll a large number of students majoring in biology along with others majoring in the social sciences and humanities. My graduate students apply Darwinian reasoning to issues in political philosophy and other areas of political science. All the students see how liberal learning at its best brings together ideas and methods from all the intellectual disciplines to illuminate the deepest questions of human life and its position in the universe.

At the core of my thinking is the idea of human nature. In today's academic world, it is common for postmodernist relativists to assert tht liberal education cannot be directed to the study of human nature, because the idea of human nature is an arbitrary social construction. But I believe that there really is a universal human nature that is constituted by at least twenty natural desires that manifest themselves throughout history in every human society, because these desires belong to the evolved nature of the human species.

These natural desires direct human behavior into regular patterns. Men and women will marry and form families. Mothers will care for their children. Young males will compete for mates and status. Societies will organize themselves as male dominance hierarchies. Competing societies will go to war. And human beings will use language and other symbols to try to figure out what it all means.

A broader model of this kind of Darwinian liberal education is David Sloan Wilson's Evolutionary Studies Program (EvoS) at Binghamton University. The website for the program can be found here. This is an integrated curriculum with a required introductory course "Evolution for Everyone" and a list of courses across the university from which students must earn a minimum number of credits. Wilson teaches "Evolution for Everyone" as the course in which all students are introduced to the central concepts of evolutionary theory as well as some illustrative application of those concepts to various fields of study. He emphasizes the application of evolutionary ideas to human nature.

Over 50 faculty members representing 15 departments are involved in the program. As a result, both faculty and students from across the university in many different departments are brought together with Darwinian reasoning as their common language to talk about questions of human nature and the natural world.

I hope to help organize a similar program at NIU. In the fall of 2007, I will be team-teaching a course on evolution with a philosopher and a biologist. We then will try to build an evolutionary studies program around this course.

Through such a Darwinian liberal education, we might renew the quest that began with Aristotle to satisfy our natural desire to understand the causes or reasons of all things.

Overcoming the "Two Cultures"

On this blog, I have often written about what seems to me to be the fundamental problem with higher education today--the fragmentation and specialization of academic disciplines so that the unity of knowledge through liberal learning has been lost. I have also written about how I see "Darwinian liberal education" as the solution to this problem, because Darwinian biology broadly conceived can be the intellectual link between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I have written about David Sloan Wilson's "evolutionary studies" program at Binghamton University in New York as a good model of how this might work.

Today's issue of the New York Times (May 27) has an article by Natalie Angier on the "New Humanities Initiative" at Binghamton, which seems to be an extension of Wilson's "evolutionary studies" pedagogy.

Traditionally, the modern university is divided between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Within these broad boundaries, each discipline is further divided into fields of specialization. Both students and scholars are taught to assume that there is no connection between these various areas of research. Of course, administrators and professors often speak about the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching. But usually this just means collecting various courses scattered across the university and classifying them as "general education." This is a fraudulent exercise because there is no real intellectual conversation across the many diverse fields of academic scholarship.

"Darwinian liberal education" would create some common ground of intellectual discussion that would bridge what C. P. Snow famously characterized as the opposition between "two cultures"--"natural scientists" versus "literary intellectuals." Actually, I would say there are at least "three cultures," because the social scientists commonly have little to say to either the "natural scientists" or the "literary intellectuals."

Unfortunately, the unification of knowledge through "Darwinian liberal education" suffers from the seduction of reductionism. Darwinian theorists--like E. O. Wilson in his book Consilience--want to unify all knowledge by reducing all knowledge to physics, chemistry, and genetics. But, as I have argued on this blog and in Darwinian Conservatism, the only defensible ground for unifying all knowledge is the biological idea of "emergence"--so that higher levels of organization bring novelties that are consistent with the lower levels but not determined by those lower levels.

In Angier's article, this problem is captured by her reference to English Professor George Levine:

"Dr. Levine has criticized many recent attempts at so-called Literary Darwinism, the application of evolutionary psychology ideas to the analysis of great novels and plays. What it usually amounts to is reimagining Emma Bovary or Emma Woodhouse as a young, fecund female hunter-gatherer circa 200,000 B.C.

"'When you maximize the importance of biological forces and minimize culture, you get something that doesn't tell you a whole lot about the particularities of literature,' Dr. Levine said. 'What you end up with, as far as I am concerned, is banality.'"

I agree because such crude reductionism overlooks the complexity of multi-leveled explanations of gene-culture co-evolution that respects the particularities and contingencies of human cultural and individual history.

To show what I mean by this, I am now beginning to work on a book that might be entitled Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Political Life. This book will develop a theoretical framework for a Darwinian political science that would be a science of political animals. Such a science would move through three levels of deep political history--the universal political history of the species, the cultural political history of the group, and the individual political history of animals in the group. To illustrate the particular application of this Darwinian political science, I will show how this science would help us to understand Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. We need to understand such events as historically contingent phenomena that cannot be predicted exactly by a science of natural causes. But still we can see how such unique events fit within the natural history of the human species and the cultural history of human politics.

I will be laying out some of what I have in mind in a paper for the American Political Science Association convention in Boston at the end of August. This will be part of a series of three panels sponsored by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy on "Evolution and Morality." The papers for these panels will be the basis for a volume of the ASPL's annual publication Nomos.

A Critical Assessment of Leon Kass's Thought and a Defense of Darwinian Liberal Education: A New Book Chapter

I have a chapter on Leon Kass's thought in a book recently published by Rowman & Littlefield--Thinking Through Science and Technology: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics in an Engineered World, edited by Glen Miller, Helena Mateus Jeronimo, and Qin Zhu.  The title of this book plays off the title of Carl Mitcham's Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1994).  Many of the authors in this new book have collaborated with or been engaged with Mitcham in his life-long philosophic study of modern science, technology, and engineering.  I worked with Mitcham when he was the Editor-In-Chief of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (Macmillan Reference, Thompson Gale, 2005).  I was one of the three associate editors for that book.

Anyone who wants to think philosophically about science and technology will want to read this book.  Unfortunately, it's an expensive book--$155 ($127 at Amazon).  But you do get a lot for your money, because it's a big book of 582 pages with 27 chapters divided into five parts: "Philosophy and Technology," "Philosophy and Engineering," "Religion, Science, and Technology," "Science and Technology Studies," and "Science and Technology Policy."  Many of the authors are the most prominent people in the field--such as Albert Borgmann, Andrew Feenberg, Carl Mitcham, and Daniel Sarewitz.  

Most of the authors are scornful of modern science and technology as having a morally and intellectually degrading influence on human life.  In that respect, I am out of place in this book, because I regard the Baconian project for science and technology as morally and intellectually defensible.  This is manifest in some of my articles for the Encyclopeda of Science, Technology, and Ethics--such as "Francis Bacon," "Biotech Ethics," and "Evolutionary Ethics."

Most of the material in my chapter ("Bioethics, Philosophy, and Religious Wisdom: A Critical Assessment of Leon Kass's Thought") comes from my many blog posts on Kass over the past 15 years--in particular, "Atheistic Religiosity in Leon Kass's Reading of the Bible" (December 28, 2021), "Leon Kass's Bioethics in Darwinian Liberal Education" (January 12, 2022), and "Leon Kass's Mistaken View of Science" (November 21, 2018).

In their "Introduction" to the book, the editors summarize my chapter in two sentences: "Larry Arnhart submits Leon Kass's historical progression of philosophical, religious, and scientific beliefs to the test, assessing their coherence and how they influenced his views on human nature, human dignity, and the appropriate limits of biotechnology.  While Kass advocated for 'a richer bioethics' informed by classics in the Western tradition to discern those limits, Arnhart instead argues for a Darwinian science of human nature as part of liberal education" (7).

That second sentence is inaccurate.  Far from rejecting Kass's "richer bioethics," I argue that it should be part of my proposed Darwinian liberal education.  My main criticism of Kass is that while what I am defending resembles what Kass proposed in Toward a More Natural Science in 1985, Kass later scorned the Darwinian naturalistic ethics of this first book, beginning with the publication in 2002 of his essay "The Permanent Limitations of Biology."  Part of this move away from his earlier scientific naturalism is Kass's atheistic religiosity in his books on the Hebrew Bible.  But then, to add to the confusion, Kass returned to his earlier naturalistic ethics in his work with the President's Council on Bioethics (2001-2005), particularly in the Council's Beyond Therapy report.

Nietzschean Nihilism, Natural Right, and Liberal Education

The failure to solve what Leo Strauss identified as the problem of natural right led Strauss and his students to embrace Nietzsche's value-positing nihilism.  This led to a Nietzschean view of liberal education as promoting the life of artist-philosophers who create new values as an expression of their will to power. 

This Straussian turn to Nietzschean nihilism was clearly intimated, although never openly affirmed, in Strauss's writings published near the end of his life and after his death.  This was also seen in Bloom's Closing of the American Mind.  And although William Deresiewicz does not fully understand what he is doing, he expresses this Nietzschean view of liberal education in his book Excellent Sheep.

The alternative to this Nietzschean turn is to solve the problem of natural right by showing how Darwinian science can confirm natural right as rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature.  This Darwinian natural right would support a Darwinian liberal education that would integrate all of the intellectual disciplines of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities into a comprehensive science of nature and of human nature as part of that natural whole.

According to Strauss in Natural Right and History, the problem of natural right is that natural right requires a teleological conception of nature that seems to have been refuted by modern natural science.  Neither in Natural Right and History nor in any other writing did Strauss explain how to solve that problem. 

In 1970, only three years before his death, Strauss wrote a new Preface to Natural Right and History, which included this sentence: "Nothing that I have learned has shaken my inclination to prefer 'natural right,' especially in its classic form, to the reigning relativism, positivist or historicist."  Thus, writing like Max Weber, Strauss put the term natural right within quotation marks, and he indicated that his affirmation of classic natural right was nothing more than his personal preference.  In Natural Right and History, Strauss said that Weber's propensity for putting terms designating value judgments in quotation marks was a "childish trick" (53).

In 1973, the year of Strauss's death, Interpretation published his "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil," which suggested his fundamental agreement with Nietzsche.  Near the end of his life, Strauss left instructions for the publication of Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, with his article on Nietzsche as the central chapter.

In 1987, Bloom's Closing of the American Mind became an international best-seller, and thus the best-selling Straussian book of all time.  Most readers saw Bloom's apparent criticism of the relativism in America's elite universities and his apparent defense of Socratic liberal education as directed to the pursuit of truth.  But some readers (Harry Jaffa, for example) also saw in the book a dramatic conflict over whether Bloom's heroic model for liberal education was to be Socrates or Nietzsche.  Some readers also noticed that Bloom's interpretation of Nietzsche followed closely what Strauss had written in his essay on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. 

Socrates and Nietzsche are the two thinkers that Bloom mentions more often than anyone else.  He sets them in opposition to one another.  And he never clearly states any disagreement with Nietzsche, while suggesting that Nietzsche might have been correct in his criticisms of Socrates (51, 60, 79-80, 143, 145, 160, 163, 194-98, 204, 207-208, 268, 270, 277, 310-11).  Much of Bloom's book is designed to show us what he calls "the extraordinary thought and philosophical greatness" of not only Nietzsche but also Heidegger and the other German nihilists (239).

Nietzsche makes his first appearance in Bloom's book in a passage explaining why Bloom began to doubt the Great Books approach to liberal education as founded on the model of Socrates.  Bloom describes the "enchanting prospect" provided by American students when he first began teaching in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  He quotes from something he wrote in 1965 about how the good students in the elite universities were open to liberal education, and how "these students are a kind of democratic version of an aristocracy" (49).  And thus Bloom echoed Strauss's hope that a Great Books liberal education could "found an aristocracy within democratic mass society" ("What Is Liberal Democracy?", 5).  In 1965, Bloom saw in his students "a spiritual yearning, a powerful tension which made the university atmosphere electric."  Later, however, he began to suspect that Nietzsche was right about how a liberal democratic culture brings a decadence that deprives the human soul of any transcendent longings:

"But the students who have succeeded that generation of the late fifties and early sixties, when the culture leeches, professional and amateur, began their great spiritual bleeding, have induced me to wonder whether my conviction--the old Great Books conviction--was correct.  That conviction was that nature is the only thing that counts in education, that the human desire to know is permanent, that all it really needs is the proper nourishment, and that education is merely putting the feast on the table.  At the very least, it is clear to me now that nature needs the cooperation of convention, just as man's art is needed to found the political order that is the condition of his natural completeness.  At worst, I fear that spiritual entropy or an evaporation of the soul's boiling blood is taking place, a fear that Nietzsche thought justified and made the center of all his thought.  He argued that the spirit's bow was being unbent and risked being permanently unstrung.  Its activity, he believed, comes from culture, and the decay of culture meant not only the decay of man in this culture but the decay of man simply.  This is the crisis he tried to face resolutely: the very existence of man as man, as a noble being, depended on him and on men like him--so he thought.  He may not have been right, but his case looks stronger all the time. . . . The soil is ever thinner, and I doubt whether it can now sustain the taller growths." (51)

So Bloom doubts the Great Books appeal to nature and the permanent natural desire to know.  He fears the cultural flattening of the human soul that was at the center of all Nietzsche's thought, and he understands Nietzsche's concern that the creation of a new nobility would require philosophic creators like himself.  Without openly embracing Nietzsche's position, Bloom points in that direction: "He may not have been right, but his case looks stronger all the time."  Originally, Bloom wanted the title of his book to be Souls Without Longing, and his book is all about the Nietzschean lament that liberal democratic culture has created people with flat souls, and that the creation of a new nobility requires creating a new culture of noble values.

"The longing for the beyond has been attenuated," Bloom declares (61).  By contrast, Bloom describes the spiritually deep lives of his uneducated grandparents, whose lives were rooted in their simple faith in the Bible, which differed from the life of the next generation:

"I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning.  When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but clichés, superficialties, the material of satire.  I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by.  I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things.  Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside.  The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished." (60)

Notice that the Bible is identified here not as a divine revelation of truth but as only one of many "revelations" or "epics" without which "there is nothing to see out there."  As Jaffa observed, "to say that without books there is nothing to see is nihilism" ("Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts," 117).  But then, as Jaffa noticed, Bloom contradicts this nihilism by referring to "natural vision" and "the real nature of things," a contradiction that runs throughout Bloom's book. 

Moreover, Bloom's account of the power of the Bible in creating a spiritually rich culture among common people echoes Nietzsche's account of how "reverence for the Bible" has until recently shaped "more relative nobility of taste and tactful reverence" among less educated people than among "the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, the educated" (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 263).

Many readers of Bloom's book assumed that his criticism of relativism was part of a defense of traditional morality.  But some readers noticed that this was not true.  Bloom declared: "It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling.  What is astounding and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives" (239).  Notice that the immorality of relativism is not appalling to Bloom.  Rather, what Bloom finds disgusting is America's "easygoing" relativism, or "nihilism, American style" (139), as opposed to the anguished relativism of Nietzsche.  "Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences" (196).

"Stripping away the illusions about values was required, so Nietzsche thought, by our situation, to disenchant all misleading hopes of comfort or consolation, thereby to fill the new creators with awe and the awareness that everything depends on them.  Nihilism is a dangerous but necessary and a possibly salutary stage in human history.  In it man faces his true situation.  It can break him, reduce him to despair and spiritual or bodily suicide.  But it can hearten him to a reconstruction of a world of meaning.  Nietzsche's works are a glorious exhibition of the soul of a man who might, if anybody can, be called creative.  They constitute the profoundest statement about creativity, by a man who had a burning need to understand it." (198)

In understanding philosophy not as the will to truth but as the will to power, as the artistic creation of values through creating culture, Nietzsche must overturn the Socratic understanding of philosophy as the quest to know the truth about nature.

"Nietzsche's psychology concerns the impulse toward God, for in that impulse the self arrays and displays all its powers; and his influence brought a new burst of religious interest, if not religion, to the intellectual world.  God is myth, Nietzsche taught.  Myths are made by poets.  This is just what Plato says in the Republic,  and for him it is equivalent to a declaration of war between philosophy and poetry.  The aim of philosophy is to substitute truth for myth (which by its very definition is falsehood, a fact too often forgotten in our post-Nietzschean fascination with myth).  Since myths are thee first and give men their first opinions, philosophy means a critical destruction of myth in favor of truth for the sake of freedom and living naturally.  Socrates, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues, questioning and confuting the received opinions, is the model of the philosophic life; and his death at the hands of his countrymen for not believing in their myths epitomizes the risks of philosophy.  Nietzsche drew precisely the opposite conclusion from the same facts about myth.  There is no nature and no such freedom.  The philosopher must do the contrary of what Socrates did.  So Nietzsche is the first philosopher ever to have attacked Socrates, because Socrates' life is not the model life, but a coruupt and monstrous one lacking in all nobility.  The tragic life, which Socrates defused and purged, is the serious life.  The new philosopher is the ally of the poets and their savior, or philosophy is itself the highest kind of poetry.  Philosophy in the old mode demythologizes and demystifies.  It has no sense of the sacred; and by disenchanting the world and uprooting man, it leads into the void.  The revelation that philosophy finds nothingness at the end of its quest informs the new philosopher that mythmaking must be his central concern in order to make a world." (208)

But even as Bloom sets up this conflict between Socrates and Nietzsche, he also hints that they might have been in fundamental agreement about philosophy as a creative art.  He identifies Socrates as "the complementary man" (268).  This unusual expression is Nietzsche's term in Beyond Good and Evil (section 207) for the value-creating philosopher.  Unlike the "objective spirit" of a scholar, who is only a mirror of reality and who "does not command," the true philosopher is a "complementary man," who is "the Caesarian cultivator and power-man of culture."  (If Strauss thought Socrates was actually a Nietzschean artist/philosopher, that would explain why he put his essay on Nietzsche at the center of his Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy.)

Like Nietzsche, Deresiewicz sets up an opposition between scientific objectivity and discovery, on the one hand, and artistic subjectivity and creativity, on the other.  Liberal education, he argues, should be on the side of art rather than science, because humanistic knowledge is not about the objective observation of external reality but about the subjective experience of internal reality, of "what reality feels like" (159).  For the liberal arts, Deresiewicz insists, the question is not "Is it true?" but "Is it true for me?" (160).  As with Nietzsche, knowledge in liberal education for Deresiewicz is not a matter of discovery and the will to truth but interpretation and the will to power.  Also like Nietzsche, Deresiewicz sees this artistic creation of meaning and purpose as a substitute for traditional religion--"aestheticism, the religion of art" (156).

Deresiewicz does not reflect on the nihilistic implications of assuming that human life has no objective goods discoverable by the human mind but only subjective values created by the human will.  Objective human goods would require some conception of natural right as rooted in natural teleology.

Bloom points to the possibility of a natural teleology of human biological nature, but his Nietzschean nihilism denies that possibility.  For example, he writes: "I mean by teleology nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process" (110).  So even as he recognizes the evident teleology of human biology, he cannot fully affirm it, because it "may be only illusory."  This happens often in his book (112-116, 126, 130, 143, 133, 166, 181, 207-208, 270-71, 300, 356-358).

Bloom recognizes that the Socratic question of how one should live is a question of how human beings fit into the natural universe.  To think through that question would require a unification of the intellectual disciplines in the modern university--the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--into a comprehensive science of nature.  He identifies "sociobiology" as one attempt to do that, but he does not develop that thought (369).

Like Strauss, Bloom's interpretation of Nietzsche concentrates on the early and late writings of Nietzsche; and thus Strauss and Bloom ignore Nietzsche's embrace of Darwinian science in Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche suggests how the problem of natural right could be solved by a Darwinian science of evolved human nature that would allow for the immanent teleology of natural human desires.

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

David Sloan Wilson's EVOLUTION FOR EVERYONE

David Sloan Wilson's new book is a gem. Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives is based on Wilson's general course on the idea of evolution at Binghamton University, which is the one required course for an interdisciplinary program on "Evolutionary Studies." The course and the book survey Wilson's many interests and research topics in evolutionary reasoning. The book organizes all of this into a broad evolutionary view of how human life fits into the order of nature. He aims to show how evolutionary reasoning can provide a common language through which the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities could be unified into a shared vision of liberal education. Previously, I have written about my similar conception of Darwinian liberal education in posts that can be found here and here.

This fall I and Neil Blackstone will be using Wilson's book as one of the readings for our course on evolution, which we hope will eventually lead to an evolutionary studies program at Northern Illinois University. At NIU, we have already moved in this direction in the Department of Political Science through our undergraduate and graduate courses in "Politics and the Life Sciences."

The general theme of Wilson's book is conveyed by the title. It's a book "for everyone," a book that tries to make evolutionary reasoning comprehensible to any human being willing to think about it. And it presents evolution as a way of making sense of our lives as fitting within the natural order of the whole. In that way, it does indeed contribute to the ancient Aristotelian conception of liberal education.

More specifically, Wilson presents a "new way of thought" that advances the evolutionary view of human life as thoroughly part of nature (67). In arguing that we are "100 per cent a product of evolution," Wilson denies both religious creationism and secular creationism. The religious creationist believes that human beings are created in God's image so that their God-given traits set them apart from, and above, the rest of nature. The secular creationist believes that human beings use their uniquely human capacities for rational choice and cultural learning to create a human realm of artifice set apart from the natural world. The religious creationist denies Darwinian evolution completely. The secular creationist accepts Darwinian evolution as explaining the ultimate causes of the living world as including the human body, while insisting that the human mind and human culture transcend Darwinian evolution. Both forms of creationism assume the idea of human beings as "transcendent selves" set apart from the natural world.

To support his claim that Darwinian evolution can explain all of human life as part of nature, Wilson must defend a broad conception of evolution as including group selection as well as individual selection and cultural evolution as well as genetic evolution. He must then show how human evolution working at many levels provides the ultimate explanation for uniquely human traits such as family life, morality, politics, religion, science, and the arts (including dance, music, literature, and the visual arts).

The two crucial elements of this broad conception of evolution is group selection and cultural evolution. From the 1960s to the 1990s, most evolutionary biologists stressed the primacy of individual selection over group selection, because they assumed that in most circumstances the competition between individual units within groups would be stronger than the competition among groups. Wilson was one of the few biologists at this time who argued that group selection could become a powerful evolutionary mechanism, because there were many circumstances in which selection among groups would be stronger than selection within groups. Although there continues to be intense debate over this. Wilson's "multilevel selection theory" of group selection is now generally regarded as plausible.

When Ed Wilson and others argued for "sociobiology" as including the biological explanation of human nature, critics rejected this as ignoring the uniquely human power of culture as transcending genetic evolution. But Ed Wilson responded that we needed to develop a "coevolutionary" theory of human nature as arising from the interaction of genes and culture. David Wilson and others have continued this thought by arguing that culture is itself the expression of genetic propensities for cultural learning, and cultural history shows evolutionary processes in which some cultural traditions prevail over others by enhancing human survival and reproduction.

Wilson develops his arguments across a broad range of topics--too broad for me to cover in one post. But I will indicate that although I find most of his arguments persuasive, I am left with at least 5 questions about points where I would like more elaboration or clarification.

1. How does Wilson account for human dominance hierarchies? Group selection generally requires leadership in which some individuals exercise dominance. And yet Wilson tends to play down the importance of dominance. For example, he contrasts the "despotism" of chimp societies with dominant alpha males and the "egalitarianism" of human hunter-gatherer societies (163). But this ignores the fact that even human foraging societies show leadership, even if the leadership is informal and episodic. Moreover, he does not recognize Frans de Waal's contrast between the "despotic dominance style" of rhesus monkeys and the "egalitarian dominance style" of chimps, with human beings following the chimp model. Moreover, in adopting Chris Boehm's theory of human foragers as showing a "reverse-dominance hierarchy," Wilson does not acknowledge that for Boehm this means that human beings do have a propensity to dominance hierarchy, but the difference is that the desire of subordinates to resist exploitation checks the power of dominant individuals (just as it does among chimps). Wilson speaks about the "admirable qualities" of Abraham Lincoln that make his face appear beautiful to us (124). But Wilson says nothing about the character of Lincoln as an intensely ambitious man who strove for the dominant position that would give him immortal glory and fame.

2. How exactly is cultural evolution constrained or guided by genetic evolution? Wilson agrees with the "social constructivists" about the importance of culture for human life. But he insists that culture itself is a product of evolution, so that what we need is "evolutionary social constructivism" (71). But since Wilson does not believe that this "social constructivism" is completely arbitrary, because it is ultimately constrained or guided by genetic propensities and by selection for survival and reproduction (98-99), he needs to explain exactly how our genetic history shapes, but does not precisely determine, our cultural history. For example, he speaks about the Hutterite communities in which people striving to emulate the cooperativeness of the early Christians act to unify individuals into collective units. But it is noteworthy that the Hutterites have not tried to abolish family life, although attachment to one's family tends to create tensions with the larger community. Those utopian communities that have tried to abolish the family and parent-child bonding--such as the "Biblical communists" in Oneida, New York, in the 19th century and the Jewish kibbutzim in the Middle East--had to give this up when their young women protested that this was against the nature of mothers not to bond with their children. Wouldn't this be an illustration of how an innate desire for parental care constrains cultural reform? (I have argued that parental care is one of the twenty natural desires that constrain and guide cultural evolution.)

3. Is Wilson's "ideal religion" a realistic possibility? Wilson devotes much space to restating his evolutionary account of religion, which he elaborated in his book Darwin's Cathedral. He defends religion as a valuable way by which people can be bound together into groups as collective units. But he is himself an atheist, because he cannot believe in the existence of supernatural agents. The practical success of religion in binding people together for cooperation shows a "practical truth" that Wilson admires. But the theological doctrines of religion contradict the "factual truth" available to natural science. To overcome this problem, Wilson looks for an "ideal religion" that would combine the "practical truth" of religious morality and the "factual truth" of natural science. But the only religious traditions that come close to this for him are Buddhism and Confucianism (261-62), because they do not seem to depend upon any belief in supernatural agents. And yet some people have wondered whether Buddhism and Confucianism are really religions at all, because in some ways, they seem almost atheistic. Similarly, Wilson's "ideal religion" looks like an atheistic religion.

4. How does Wilson propose to deal with conflicts of interests? Wilson indicates that every major religious tradition--and even "stealth religions" like Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy--depart from factual realism by assuming that there are no conflicts of interest between self-interest and the interests of others, because they assume that properly serving the interests of others will ultimately serve one's own interests. This implies that the "ideal belief system" would have to recognize and somehow manage inescapable conflicts of interest. "The real world is full of complicated trade-offs, conflicts of interest, and win-lose situations. In principle, a belief system could score high on factual realism by representing all of these complexities and also score high on practical realism by showing how to deal with them" (274-75). But then Wilson never really explains how his "ideal belief system" would deal with such conflicts of interests. Does this hide the ugly fact that sometimes conflicts of interests are so deep that they cannot be resolved by honest negotiation and mutual trust, and consequently, the final resolution comes by force or fraud? Consider, for example, the problem of slavery in American history. As Abraham Lincoln indicated there was a conflict between the moral sense that recognized slavery as evil and the self-interest of the Southerners whose way of life depended on slavery and the self-interest of those in the North who wanted to preserve the Union. Lincoln tried to overcome this conflict of interest by proposing voluntary compensated emancipation with voluntary colonization of the freed blacks somewhere outside the United States. When this proposal was rejected, and the country was thrown into Civil War, the final resolution of the issue came by force of arms. Is there any way of avoiding such tragic conflicts of interest? Or would evolutionary theory teach us that this is part of the tragic character of the human condition?

5. What is the "shared value system" that would make the "global village" a "moral community"? Wilson argues that his evolutionary theory of group selection can be applied to international relations. After all, "nations are nothing more than very large groups that are trying to function as collective units" (283-84). He lays out 14 points for promoting international cooperation. One of his points is that "morality is required for morale," and therefore, "a shared value system is . . . required at the international scale for the global village to become a moral community" (292). But what would this "shared value system" be? International human rights? Universal brotherhood? How exactly would this work? Wilson doesn't say. If he were to say more, he would have to again confront the problem of conflicts of interests. Isn't it utopian to expect that there will be no deep conflicts of interests among nations? Won't such conflicts of interests make war inevitable? Wouldn't Darwinian science support a realistic acceptance of the tragic dimensions of human life as facing deep conflicts of interests at all levels of social life--from the family to the village to the tribe to the nation to the international community?

In raising such profound questions about the nature of human social life as a product of natural evolution, Wilson's book shows the kind of deep thinking that would be promoted by a Darwinian liberal education.

Darwin's World of Pain and Wonder

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on February 12, 1809. Some of my thoughts about this remarkable coincidence and the deeper connections between Darwin and Lincoln can be found in some previous posts here, here, and here.

This past year has produced many celebrations and publications related to the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species. The latest issue of The New Atlantis has an article by Algis Valiunas that offers a brief summary of Darwin's life and work, based largely on Janet Browne's two-volume biography. Although Valiunas's article is notable only for its shallowness, it does have a good title: "Darwin's World of Pain and Wonder." Contrary to the assertions of Darwin's existentialist critics like Peter Lawler, Darwin pondered the meaning of love and death. In particular, the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie left him with deep scars. Trying to explain the cosmic meaning of suffering was part of the motivation for his scientific inquiry. But through his pain, he also felt wonder--the wonder of the human mind's capacity for uncovering the intelligible order of nature, while still facing the unfathomable mystery of the origin of all things.

It is regrettable that so few people actually read Darwin and see the power and poignancy of his mind at work. A few years ago, I suggested that the best way to resolve the dispute over the teaching of Darwinian evolution in high school biology classes would be to allow students to actually read Darwin himself. Most of the criticisms of Darwin can be found in Darwin's own writings--especially, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Darwin openly confronts what he calls the "difficulties" for his theory, and he shows how the alternative to his "theory of natural selection" is the "theory of special creation." If high school students were allowed to read Darwin's writings and then read some of the writings from the proponents of "intelligent design," the students could weigh the evidence and arguments and make up their own minds. But when I proposed this, I was attacked by people like Chris Mooney--author of The Republican War on Science--who insisted that high students were not smart enough to read Darwin for themselves and then reach their own conclusions. Instead, Mooney insisted, they should read only textbooks that tell them what the "experts" think, and they certainly should never be permitted to read any writings criticizing evolution from the viewpoint of "intelligent design."

My original proposal was laid out in a short article for Inside Higher Ed, which can be found here.

Recently, I was delighted to hear about a high school course on evolution at Seattle Academy taught by Melinda Mueller. She agreed with my proposal for teaching Darwin, and she has organized her class around having her students read Darwin's Origin. She found that these high school students were quite capable of reading Darwin for themselves and assessing his argument. As a final class project, she had her students create a webpage--"Virtual Museum of the Origin"--for which each student "curated" a chapter of the Origin.

I would be happy to hear about any other high school biology teachers who have done something like this.

There is a deep point at issue here. We live in an Age of Science and Technology, which began some four centuries ago. But we still do not have a broad understanding of what that scientific vision of the cosmos means for human life. Teaching science to our students through ordinary textbooks doesn't provide such an understanding. But reading Darwin as part of what I have called "Darwinian liberal education" could promote the sort of human understanding of our scientific age that we need. What we need, as suggested by Karl Jaspers, is a Second Axial Age--a period of deep philosophical, scientific, and religious reflection on the meaning of human life within an evolutionary cosmos.

My earlier post on "Darwinian liberal education" can be found here.

The article by Valiunas can be found here.

My post on "Darwin's Understanding of Love and Death" can be found here.

Illiberal Conservatism in France: An Interview with "L'Incorrect"

I am some times asked why I identify Darwinian conservatism as a liberal conservatism, or as a fusion of classical liberalism and traditionalist conservatism.  My explanation is that I want to distinguish liberal conservatism from the illiberal conservatism of authoritarian conservatives like Joseph de Maistre.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I was interviewed by a journalist with the new French magazine L'Incorrect, which began publishing last fall.  L'Incorrect is a conservative magazine designed to "develop the virtues of the multiple houses of the right" in France, according to its editor Jacques de Guillebon, in his opening editorial statement. 

Many of the people working with this magazine have some connection with Marion Marechal-Le Pen, who is the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding leader of the French National Front, a far right party, and the niece of Marine Le Pen, the recent presidential contender of the National Front.  In 2007, at age 22, Marechal-Le Pen became the youngest person ever to be elected to the French Parliament. 

Although last spring she announced her retirement from politics, she continues to be influential as a leader of a new conservative movement in France that seems close to the Trump movement in the United States.  Steve Bannon identified her as a "rising star" in French politics.

Marechal-Le Pen has been arguing for a coalition joining the National Front and some or all of the Republicans.  The Republicans are a center-right or liberal conservative party that was formed in 2015 by renaming the Union for a Popular Movement party, which had been founded in 2002 under the leadership of Jacques Chirac, the former President of France.

This suggests to me that if L'Incorrect is associated with Marechal-Le Pen's position, then the magazine should be identified with a liberal conservatism.  But my interviewer--Benjamin Demeslay--identified the French conservative tradition with the "anti-liberal tropism" of Joseph de Maistre and Charles Maurras.  I responded to this by criticizing the illiberal conservatism of Maistre and suggesting that French conservatives like Marechal-Le Pen are actually far more liberal than they realize, and certainly they don't embrace the absolutist authoritarianism of Maistre that provided the intellectual seeds for fascism.

L'Incorrect has published a short version of my comments.  Here I provide the full text--seven questions (in italics) and my answers:

1. You defend a "Darwinian conservatism" against "metaphysical conservatism". These expressions are enough to surprise the French reader. The French conservative tradition remains strongly impregnated by Catholicism, a certain counter-revolutionary and anti-liberal tropism (from Joseph de Maistre to Charles Maurras), even a mistrust of "the Technique" (the essays of the Christian Jacques Ellul or the last Heidegger). English conservatism, heir to Edmund Burke, is now attracting renewed interest, with the translation of the philosopher Roger Scruton. There is nothing comparable to your conservatism in France. How would you define it?

Metaphysical conservatism views human social order as grounded in a transcendent realm of cosmic design.  Evolutionary conservatism is empiricist in viewing human social order as grounded in common human experience as shaped by human nature, human custom, and human judgment.  Both forms of conservative thought can be found in Edmund Burke.  

In the United States, Russell Kirk spoke for metaphysical conservatism when he appealed to the conservative belief in “the state as a divinely ordained moral essence.”  Friedrich Hayek spoke for evolutionary conservatism when he appealed to the classical liberal idea that social order could emerge through the evolution of spontaneous orders in a free society.  My claim is that a Darwinian evolutionary science of human nature and human culture supports Hayek’s side.

          In taking Hayek’s side in this debate, I am defending a liberal conservatism that is a fusion of what Americans identify as classical liberalism and traditionalist conservatism.  Actually, even Kirk is a liberal conservative insofar as he rejects the illiberal conservatism of Joseph de Maistre.  (A brief statement of my reasoning here is my article on “Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism” in the Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.)

          Although you identify the French conservative tradition with the Catholic “illiberal tropism” of Maistre, I doubt that French conservatives really agree with Maistre’s illiberal conservatism.  Do French conservatives agree with Maistre’s claim that all stable government requires belief in its absolute divine authority as enforced by the execution of heretics who deny religious orthodoxy?  Do French conservatives agree with Maistre’s defense of the violent persecution of heretics in the Spanish Inquisition as necessary to protect Spain from the disorder of Protestantism?  Do French conservatives agree with Maistre’s argument that all social order depends on the terror of punishment by “the executioner”?  I doubt it.

          In fact, Maistre’s theocratic authoritarianism would support radical Islam in its enforcement of Sharia.  But don’t French conservatives—like Marion Marechal-Le Pen-- reject this as contrary to French culture? If so, then they are showing their liberal conservatism in opposition to the illiberal conservatism of radical Islam and Maistre.

          You identify the French conservative tradition with Catholic Christianity, and I know that conservatives like Marechal-Le Pen have stressed the “Christian roots” of French culture.  But isn’t it true, according to some surveys, that most of the French people identify themselves as non-religious or even atheistic?  

By contrast, most Americans identify themselves as deeply religious.  Surely, this arises from the American liberal tradition of religious liberty and religious life in voluntary associations free from governmental coercion; so that a liberal idea has a conservative effect in promoting a religious cultural tradition in civil society without state enforcement.

You mention Roger Scruton as a Burkean conservative now being read in France, Scruton is an example of a metaphysical conservative who thinks a religious attitude is essential for a healthy moral order, and therefore that traditional religious experience needs to be defended against a Darwinian science that claims to explain the place of human beings in the natural world without any reference to a transcendent realm beyond nature.  And yet--like many other metaphysical conservatives--Scruton does not believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion.  He wants to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines.  

We know that God is dead, Scruton suggests, but we also know that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption through religious art and ritual.  That's the truth that Scruton sees in Richard Wagner's Ring cycle.  To me, this atheistic religiosity is incoherent self-deception.

2. French conservatives are currently facing a "progressive" offensive: same-sex marriage, medically assisted procreation "for all", surrogacy, etc. Conservative resistance largely comes from Catholic circles. You are an advocate of "natural rights". How do you reconcile them with Darwin's legacy? Your project of a "biological ethics of human nature" is audacious.

My project of a “biological ethics of human nature” argues that there are at least twenty natural desires inherent in our evolved human nature, and that, if the good is the desirable, we can judge social orders by how well they allow human beings to satisfy those natural desires.  

So, for example, I think we have evolved natural desires for sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental care.  For most human beings, therefore, marriage and parenting are crucial to their human flourishing.  For Thomas Aquinas’s natural law teaching, marriage is natural insofar as it satisfies the natural desires for conjugal bonding and parental care.  

Is it possible that same-sex marriage could satisfy these two natural desires?  If so, then Darwinian conservatives would allow same-sex marriage as part of a free society.  There is an empirical question here.  Whether same-sex marriage satisfies or frustrates these natural desires—whether children are harmed by same-sex parenting—will have to be decided by our experience with same-sex marriage.

In any case, I assume that most conservatives today would not favor capital punishment for homosexuals, which was common not so long ago in Europe and North America.  Why the change?  Is it because we have discovered that homosexuality need not be harmful to the social order, and so it need not be punished as a capital crime?  Can we say then that illiberal Islamic conservatives are wrong in persecuting homosexuals?

3. Scientific data are generally absent from the debates in France. While ethnic statistics are "of course" banned in our country, even official immigration statistics are under dispute. The observation is often the same for economic problems. How would you describe the relationship of American intellectuals, and your own relationship, to science?

          To a large degree, the utopian Left is hostile to the science of human nature, because that science seems to put restraints on the malleability of human beings by social engineering.  So, for example, the Left rejects any scientific evidence that there are natural differences on average between men and women, because the Left dreams of achieving an androgynous society.

          Darwinian conservatives respect science as confirming our common experience that there really is a human nature, that that human nature constrains but does not determine human culture, and that human nature and human culture jointly constrain but do not determine our individual identities.

          Darwinian conservatives see this science as supporting the conservative view that the best social order is one of ordered liberty rooted in natural desires, customary traditions, and prudential judgments.

          Darwinian conservatives argue that human freedom is good, because when human beings are free from coercion, they will voluntarily cooperate in the evolution of social orders that are more successful in satisfying the twenty natural human desires than any planned order using coercive power to achieve its goals.  Consequently, social orders with more human freedom will be more adaptive in securing human well-being and happiness than are those social orders with less human freedom.

          These are empirical claims that require empirical confirmation by the scientific measurement of freedom and its consequences.  And, indeed, this can now be done using the annual Human Freedom Index published by the Fraser Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Friedrich-Naumann Foundation for Freedom.  This is a comprehensive index of human freedom that combines economic freedom and personal freedom using 79 distinct indicators for 159 countries for 2015.  

          Here are the top ten countries: Switzerland (1), Hong Kong (2), New Zealand (3), Ireland (4), Australia (5), Finland (6), Norway (7), Denmark (8), Netherlands (9), and United Kingdom (tied at 9^th).  The United States is at 17^th, and France is at 33^rd.  The bottom four are Iran (154), Egypt (155), Venezuela (158), and Syria (159).  This allows for an empirical science in measuring the correlation of human freedom with human happiness and of the lack of human freedom with human misery.

4. In France, the conservatives have for several years defended an idea inherited from the communist Antonio Gramsci: the "metapolitical" or cultural action would precede the political victory. What do you think of this strategy? Do intellectual debates really affect the cultural and political life of your country? Their themes are little known to us.

          In the United States, there are many avenues for promoting the intellectual investigation of the principles of traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism.  The three most important avenues are private educational foundations, think tanks, and higher education.  Educational foundations—for example, Liberty Fund and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—sponsor hundreds of conferences every year and publishing programs that influence cultural and political life.  Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute promote the discussion of conservative and libertarian ideas.  And despite the pressures of “political correctness,” higher education does allow for some open discussion of these ideas.

          A good illustration of how intellectual and cultural activity in America has promoted Darwinian conservatism is the remarkable success of evolutionary psychology over the past 40 years.  In 1975, the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology provoked an intense outcry from the Left—insisting that any biological explanation of human behavior was strictly prohibited.  But now evolutionary psychology—as taught by people like Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steve Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Matt Ridley, and others—has had immense influence in psychology, anthropology, history, and the social sciences generally.  Now, even some leftists like Peter Singer defend a “Darwinian Left” that accepts limits on leftist social engineering from evolved human nature!

          This has implications for social policy.  For example, it has now become generally accepted that the evolutionary psychologists are right in arguing that evolved natural differences between males and females make young men (on average) more inclined to violence and social disorder than are women.  This confirms the conservative insight that every society has the problem of civilizing young men through good parenting and marriage.  (This and other Darwinian ideas are evident in James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein’s Crime and Human Nature.)

5. There are many transdisciplinary studies in the United States (psychology, biology, sociology and political philosophy). I think of Charles Murray's book Coming Apart, which analyzes the ghettoisation of American society on the basis of cognitive abilities and educational level, and the new "class racism" of some progressives. In France, these themes emerge timidly, but separately. For example, with the works of the geographer Christophe Guilluy on French Fractures; or the recent work of Dr. Laurent Alexandre on The war of intelligences. What do you think of these analyzes, and do you judge them influential?

          One illustration of how interdisciplinary studies might support Darwinian conservatism is the special meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in the Galapagos Islands in June of 2013, for which the theme was “Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty.”  Participants included economists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, philosophers, physicists, political scientists, and theologians.  I presented a paper on Darwinian conservatism.  The general theme was how evolutionary science might support classical liberal and traditionalist conservative views of liberty and social cooperation.  This shows the interdisciplinary influence of Darwinian evolutionary ideas among classical liberals and conservatives.

          Charles Murray was at this conference, and he indicated that he agreed with everything I had to say.  Smart guy!  In fact, he is, in some ways, the epitome of a Darwinian conservative.  He is a libertarian or classical liberal who is also a Burkean conservative in his respect for the importance of traditional institutions in shaping the moral and intellectual virtues that sustain social order and liberty.  He sees all of this as rooted in the evolved human nature that can be explained by evolutionary science.

6. The question of "political identities" seems to have become obsessive in the United States. We think of the alt-right, or the defenders of positive discrimination, ... Of course, our two countries are profoundly different: France is of universalist and post-colonial culture, but identity and populism becomes more important. Our societies are experiencing major demographic upheavals, which announce political upheavals. What would be the conservative answer to these problems?

          The United States is also “universalist” in being founded on the universal principles affirmed in the Declaration of Independence.  Within that universalist identity, the United States also shows the cultural pluralism of diverse voluntary associations (so admired by Alexis de Tocqueville) and regional diversity across the states in a federal political system. 

          The United States is in general a deeply religious nation, but it has never had an established church at the national level.  The Constitution of 1787 was free of any religious establishment, and it declared “no religious test” for public office.  Some of the states had established churches for a few decades, but by 1830 they were abolished.  Now there is religious diversity across the states.  According to some surveys, Utah and the Southern states show weekly church attendance at 40% to 51% of the population, while the New England states show lower rates of 17% to 20%.

          This is what a Darwinian conservative would expect to happen in a free society: the evolved natural desire for religious understanding will lead to religious belief and practice, although there will be individual variation, and some individuals will live healthy, satisfying lives without religious devotion.

          In such a free society, people find their social identity in their families, their neighborhoods, their friendships, their churches, their clubs, and in many other voluntary associations.  That’s the way our evolved nature as social animals is must fully expressed.

          The alt-right is mistaken in suggesting that American culture depends on white racial or ethnic identity.  Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution says anything about racial or ethnic identity.  Of course, the United States has suffered from racial and ethnic conflicts, but despite that, American society has become remarkably peaceful in its multiracial and multiethnic pluralism.  I say that as someone who grew up in the American South, saw the violence of racial segregation, and then saw the amazing cultural transformation as the South became racially integrated.  Human beings have evolved propensities to tribalism, but they also have evolved propensities to cooperate for mutual benefit.

7. You take a critical look at Donald Trump in your articles. In France, his presidency continues to feed some hopes in conservative circles. We talk about its good economic results, even its action against "cultural Marxism". Others see the Trump Presidency as the "swan song" of genuine conservatism. What is your point of view?

           Look, let’s agree on the obvious truth before us—Donald Trump is a vulgar man, who has no moral or intellectual virtues.  Conservatives should agree that statesmanship requires good character, and therefore Trump’s bad character makes it impossible for him to lead in the enforcement of any good policies.  He is a silly narcissist who becomes resentful when he suspects people don’t love him as much as he loves himself.  He is a childish man who cannot control his childish impulses.  Consequently, his White House is, and must always be, utterly chaotic.

          Do the French conservatives deny this?  Do they believe that a man without moral or intellectual virtues can be a statesman?