The Darwinian Evolution of Russell Kirk's Permanent Things

In 2010, The Intercollegiate Review published my article on "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  I argued that while 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.  I explained how that conflict had arisen in the history of conservative thought beginning with Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, in which one could see the tension between Burke's metaphysical conservatism and his evolutionary conservatism.  I indicated what was at stake between those two positions, and I defended the evolutionary side of this dispute.  I concluded with a practical illustration of the moral implications of this debate as applied to the American moral controversy over slavery.

In some previous posts, I have defended my argument in that article against some critics.  But I now see that I was mistaken about one point.  I thought that Russell Kirk had adopted the metaphysical side of Burke's conservatism and ignored the evolutionary side that would support a Darwinian conservatism.  Now I see that Kirk's writings actually show the same tension between the metaphysical and the evolutionary that first arose in Burke's Reflections.  This thought came to me as I pondered the presentations at the Kirk Center conference on Kirk and Scruton.

KIRK AND THE PERMANENT THINGS

Kirk stated the metaphysical and religious version of conservatism in 1953 in The Conservative Mind.  The first canon of conservative thought, he declared, was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead."  Consequently, "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature."  In later formulations of this first canon, Kirk spoke of the conservative belief in "a transcendent moral order."  In all of his formulations, he connected this principle to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn," and he spoke of Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design."  Opposed to such conservative thinking were "those scientific doctrines, Darwinism chief among them, which have done so much to undermine the first principles of conservative order" (Kirk 1985: 8-11; 1982: xv).  Here in the early Kirk, we see the common fear of many conservatives that Darwinian science denies a conservative order by denying the religious belief in a transcendent metaphysical order.

But then, in Enemies of the Permanent Things, first published in 1969, Kirk showed how enduring norms for human life, which he called "the permanent things," could be grounded empirically in human experience--human nature, human custom, and human judgment--without any necessary appeal to a metaphysical moral cosmology.  Previously, I had thought that Kirk understood the "permanent things" to be eternal things that therefore depended on a transcendent eternal order in which human nature was an unchanging eternal essence created by God.  Against this, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not eternal is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.  I had not noticed that in the Enemies of the Permanent Things, Kirk had identified the permanent things as "enduring standards" set by an enduring human nature as the ground for "a law of nature."  The permanent things are "patterns or rules which recognize the enduring nature of certain moral and social qualities." Moreover, the norms vary for each species of life: "the norm for the wasp or the snake is not the norm for man" (Kirk 2016: 1, 3, 151).

That this allows for an evolutionary conservatism is particularly clear in one section of the Enemies of the Permanent Things with the title "The Doors of Normative Perception" (2016: 23-29).  The reader of this section should notice the crucial influence on Kirk of two authors C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man) and David Hume ("Of the Standard of Taste" and The Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding).  Kirk cites Hume three times in this short section.  This is remarkable because Kirk identifies Hume as the "most formidable of skeptics" (6), and therefore Kirk's reasoning here is compatible with a Humean skepticism that denies religious metaphysics and affirms an evolutionary conception of human nature and the world.  Similarly, in Lewis's Abolition of Man, Lewis is clear that his argument for a natural moral law should be persuasive with skeptics because it does not require any belief in the supernatural.

Kirk says there are "three doors of normative perception: revelation, custom or common sense, and the insights of the seer" (23).  But while Kirk himself "embraces the transcendent truth of revelation," he chooses not to appeal to revelation in this book because he addresses himself "to doubters, as well as to the converted."  Moreover, Kirk observes that revelation is not a reliable source of knowledge for most human beings because "direct revelation" has been "extremely rare."  Most of the time what is presented as "divine wisdom" has come through "very human prophets" or seers who have not had a direct revelation.  Apparently, Moses had a direct revelation when God spoke to him through the burning bush.  But Moses was the only one who heard the words.  When people who claim to have had a direct revelation try to express what God told them, most of what they say is "inexpressible in language, and almost unthinkable in thought" (24).  So revelation is a source for understanding the permanent things that is incomprehensible to skeptics or unbelievers.

Custom is a better source.  To understand custom, Kirk relies on Hume.  He paraphrases a passage from Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" (Hume 1985: 241):

In morals and taste, says Hume, we govern ourselves by custom--that is, by the habits of the human race.  The standards of morality are shown to us by study of the story of mankind, and the arbiters of those standards are men of strong sense and delicate sentiments, whose impressions force themselves upon the wills of their fellowmen (24).

He also quotes from Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 1902: 5.1.36) about how custom is "the great guide of life."  Custom constitutes "an immemorial empiricism" (26).

But how did this "folk wisdom" embodied in custom come into being?  Kirk suggests:

The answer may be that at the beginnings of civil social order, some individuals--men whose names have perished--discovered the truths that we now call custom and common sense.  Hume's men of strong sense and delicate sentiment, or their primitive forerunners, presumably existed when man was becoming true man, and their insights were impressed upon their primitive fellows. . . . So it may be with the practices and beliefs which we call custom and common sense: originally these may have been the intuitions or the empirical conclusions of gifted individuals, who were emulated by the common man" (26-27).

Notice that Kirk suggests that human nature had to evolve from a primitive state "when man was becoming true man."  Notice also that customary norms arose as "empirical conclusions of gifted individuals."  Kirk goes on to explain that these are "empirical conclusions" about human nature.  "By definition, human nature is constant.  Because of that constancy, men of vision are able to describe the norms, the rules, for mankind" (29).

This suggests human evolution at three levels--human nature, human custom, and human judgment.  Human nature evolves from a prehuman condition.  Then human custom evolves as "gifted individuals" judge the norms or rules that best conform to that evolved human nature.  This three-leveled evolutionary analysis is even clearer in Lewis's Abolition of Man.

LEWIS AND THE TAO

Here I borrow some material from some previous posts.

Lewis sees the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). "Nature" has many senses, and if we define it in opposition to "the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural" (81), then the Tao is not natural. But it is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).

The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).

Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with (61).

At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.

At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).

If you lay this alongside what Kirk says about "The Doors of Normative Perception," you'll see a coincidence of thought that shows Kirk was following the same line of reasoning.

THE DARWINIAN EVOLUTION OF THE PERMANENT THINGS

The three-leveled evolutionary analysis of norms presented by Kirk and Lewis corresponds to what I have argued for on this blog--and in various articles and books--the Darwinian evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment.

Moral norms are rooted in the twenty natural desires of our genetically evolved human nature:  a complete life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, freedom from oppressive domination, courage in war, health, beauty, property, language and storytelling, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic pleasure, religious transcendence, and intellectual understanding.  

And if the good is the desirable (as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas argued), the best social order can be judged to be the one that secures the widest satisfaction of those natural desires (Adler 1992; Arnhart 1998: 21-36; Aquinas, ST, I, q. 5, a. 1).  When Kirk gives examples of norms--"a norm of charity; a norm of justice; a norm of freedom; a norm of duty; a norm of fortitude" (7)--they correspond to some of the natural desires.

The full expression of these moral norms has come through the human cultural evolution of moral tradition.  To understand this, we need an evolutionary science of cultural group selection.  This is what Kirk identifies as the cultural history of custom or tradition.

But then that cultural evolution ultimately depends on the evolution of human individuality because culture is driven by the agency of individuals who formulate the social norms for their cultural groups.  We need to understand the evolved personality and life history of those individuals who are agents of cultural change acting through coercion or persuasion.  Consider, for instance, how the cultural history of the United States was altered by the dominant individuals in the American Continental Congress that drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence, or those in the Constitutional Convention who drafted and promoted the Constitution of 1787.  What we need here is an agent-based evolutionary theory of how individual agents create, maintain, and modify group functional culture.  We need to understand how, as Kirk says, culture is "the creation of a talented little minority, over centuries" (51).

We need what I have called "Darwinian liberal education" that would develop an interdisciplinary science that would explain the evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment as part of a comprehensive science of nature as a whole.

That would give us a science of the permanent things.

REFERENCES

Adler, Mortimer. 1992. Desires, Right and Wrong: The Ethics of Enough. New York: Macmillan Pubishing.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica.

Arhart, Larry.  1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Arnhart, Larry.  2010. "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." The Intercollegiate Review 45: 22-32.

Hume, David.  1985.  Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary.  Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Hume, David. 1902. Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kirk, Russell, ed. 1982. The Portable Conservative Reader. New York: Penguin Books.

Kirk, Russell.  1985.  The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot. Seventh Revised Edition. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Kirk, Russell.  2016. Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormality in Literature and Politics. With an Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd. Providence, RI: Cluny Media.

Lewis, C. S.  1947. The Abolition of Man.  New York: Macmillan.

Kirk's Permanent Things and Hayek's Enduring Things

The Philadelphia Society's fall meeting was on "The Permanent Things".  The panels were designed to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind in 1953.  "The permanent things" was a phrase that Kirk took from T. S. Eliot, and much of the discussion turned on the interpretation and assessment of that idea.

Almost all of the speakers were uncritical in their praise of Kirk.  The only critics were me and Alan Charles Kors.  Kors is a prominent historian at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his studies of the intellectual history of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.  Kors defended the French Enlightenment, which was a bold move before an audience of Kirkian conservatives.  I defended Friedrich Hayek's evolutionary conservatism as an alternative to Kirk's metaphysical conservatism.

Kors and I were in complete agreement.  That might seem odd, particularly since Hayek presented his Burkean evolutionary conservatism as rooted in the British and Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the French Enlightenment. 

But Kors argued that what Burkean conservatives criticize as the excesses of the French Revolution--the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror--manifest the intellectual legacy of Rousseau rather than the philosophes.  After all, Rousseau was a vehement opponent of the philosophes.  Leaders of the French Enlightenment like Voltaire and Montesquieu opposed every form of despotism and supported the tolerance, liberty, and commercial spirit that they saw in Great Britain.  Robespierre's "Republic of Virtue" was inspired not by the thought of Voltaire or Montesquieu but by Rousseau's Social Contract.  For example, Robespierre's "Religion of the Supreme Being" was explicitly an attempt to enforce Rousseau's teaching that all citizens must embrace a deistic religion, and that neither atheists nor Christians can be true citizens.

In his speech, Kors often referred to Hayek in ways that suggested that most of French Enlightenment thought was in agreement with Hayek's evolutionary liberalism, which I defended in my speech.

In arguing that Hayek's evolutionary reasoning was superior to Kirk's metaphysical reasoning, I faced a problem that was implicit throughout this conference:  it is hard to develop any intellectual assessment of Kirk's thought, because he was not a moral or political thinker but rather a man of poetic imagination.  This was indicated in the first speech of the conference by Bradley Birzer of Hillsdale College.  Having recently  completed a biography of Kirk based on his study of Kirk's papers and correspondence, Birzer was in a good position to offer a general view of Kirk's work.  His main conclusion was that Kirk was not a political philosopher who developed his reasoning in a logically rigorous manner, because he was actually a literary or historical story-teller.  The appeal of Kirk comes from the imaginative, evocative style of his writing, not from any rigorous argumentation.  Birzer even admitted that Kirk often contradicted himself.  But still Birzer tried to defend Kirk's thought as coherent.

In one of the first critical reviews of The Conservative Mind--in The Freeman (July 1955)--Frank Meyer complained that Kirk's conservatism was "not a body of principles, but a tone, an attitude," an attitude of reverence for the wisdom of tradition.  Like Hayek, Meyer agreed that human reason needed to operate within tradition; but he also thought that we need to appeal to some rational principles in judging tradition.  After all, what we inherit by tradition is often in need of reform, and some traditions are so bad as to be tyrannical.  Occasionally, Kirk conceded this, but then he would never explain how this reformation of tradition was to be carried out.

So, for example, as Kors indicated in his speech, the oppressive traditions of the ancient regime in France needed to be overturned.  And those like Montesquieu and Voltaire offered arguments for prudent reforms that would move France towards the free, prosperous, and tolerant society that was emerging in Great Britain.

Similarly, I argued in my speech that the American Southern tradition of slavery was so obviously oppressive that it needed to be abolished.  Kirk was unclear about this.  He did say, in The Conservative Mind, that Southern conservatives were mistaken in founding their conservatism on slavery.  But he didn't explain why he thought they were mistaken.  Moreover, while Kirk appealed to a metaphysics of the "permanent things"--a transcendent moral order of divine law--as the first principle of conservatism, he did not confront the fact that the Southern Christian conservatives grounded their defense of slavery in the divine law of the Bible.

Like Kirk, Richard Weaver insisted that any healthy culture had to be grounded in a "metaphysical dream of the world."  Weaver also saw that the "metaphysical dream" of the Southern slaveholders sanctified slavery as conforming to the Bible.  And he offered no way to judge that Southern tradition as wrong.

My argument was that our evolved human nature supports a natural moral sense that allows us to recognize that the tradition of Biblical religion was wrong in sanctioning slavery, because we can see that slaves are not naturally adapted to their slavery, and that they will resist enslavement as exploitation or social parasitism.  We can then pass the Bible through the filter of our natural moral sense and eliminate those Biblical traditions that we know to be evil.

Some of the speakers at this conference--such as David Jeffrey--suggested that the only source of moral authority was divine law, and particularly the divine law of the Hebrew Bible.  It was not clear to me, however, that Jeffrey and others really believed that we should embrace all of the Mosaic law, which would require a brutal despotism.

There was a disturbing tendency for some of the speakers to imply a divine command theory of moral order--that there is no way to know right from wrong except by obeying whatever God commands.  One speaker even appealed to Kierkegaard as correctly seeing that all standards come from divine authority.

Frederick Ross made the same kind of argument in his Slavery Ordained by God (1857).  He insisted that what is right and wrong is determined completely by God's command.  Therefore, if the Bible sanctions slavery, it must be right; and the abolitionist argument that slavery is wrong because it violates a natural standard of justice is atheism and blasphemy.

Surely, the Kirkian conservatives would want to reject this.  But to do that, they would have to appeal to some natural moral experience that allows us to correct the mistakes that can arise in traditions of divine law. 

The Enduring Things: Remarks for The Philadelphia Society

The Philadelphia Society will be meeting next week, October 4-5, in Atlanta for a conference on "The Permanent Things," which celebrates the 60th anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind.  I will be on a panel on "Human Nature and the Permanent Things." 

Here's the text of my remarks, which consist largely of excerpts from my article in the Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.

If we accept evolutionary science, then human nature is not one of the permanent things.  But it is one of the enduring things.  And that’s enough.

An evolved human nature that is enduring but not permanent is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.

That’s not enough, however, for a metaphysical conservatism that appeals to a transcendent moral cosmology of eternal order as intelligently designed by the Creator.

This contrast between evolutionary conservatism and metaphysical conservatism was displayed in the debate between Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk at the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. 

Kirk had stated his metaphysical and religious conservatism in 1953 in The Conservative Mind.  The first canon of conservative thought, he declared, was “belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.”  Consequently, “politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature.”  Kirk spoke of the conservative belief in “a transcendent moral order,” and in Edmund Burke’s “description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn,” and Kirk also spoke of Burke’s view of history as “the unfolding of Design.”  Kirk warned against Darwinian evolutionary science as undermining this metaphysical conservatism because it denies the religious belief in a transcendent moral order of intelligent design.

In this same tradition of metaphysical conservatism, Richard Weaver insisted that a healthy cultural order required a “metaphysical dream of the world,” so that people could imagine their cultural life as a “metaphysical community” fulfilling a cosmic purpose.  Like Kirk, Weaver worried that Darwin’s theory of evolution denied this “metaphysical dream” of cosmic order by explaining human beings as products of a natural evolutionary process governed by material causes that were not directed to any cosmic purposes.  Consequently, in the Darwinian view, human cultural order was deprived of any transcendent meaning because it could not be seen as serving the cosmic order of the Creator’s intelligently designed universe.

Since Hayek accepted Darwinian science but doubted the existence of God, he disagreed with Kirk’s metaphysical conservatism.  This led Hayek to insist—at the 1957 meeting—that he was not really a “conservative” at all, but a “liberal” in the classical tradition of Burke and the Old Whigs.  He objected to the “obscurantism” of a conservative attitude that rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution as morally corrupting.  He elaborated his view of Burkean liberalism as belonging to a British empiricist evolutionary tradition contrasted with a French rationalistic design tradition.  In the evolutionary tradition of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Burke, Hayek explained, “it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility—the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution.”  He then suggested that Darwin’s theory of biological evolution was derived from the theories of social evolution developed by the Scottish philosophers.

That both Kirk and Hayek appealed to Burke suggests that they were both Burkean liberal conservatives.  But their disagreement reflects a tension within Burke’s political thought, with Kirk embracing the metaphysical side of Burke’s conservatism, and Hayek embracing the evolutionary side.

The evolutionary tradition of social thought was deepened by Charles Darwin, particularly in his Descent of Man, in his explanation of moral order as rooted in a moral sense that is part of the evolved nature of human beings.  He saw moral progress in human history as a product of the complex evolutionary interaction of innate sociality, cultural learning, and deliberate judgment.  “Ultimately,” he concluded, “our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.”  Darwin observed that this moral sense “perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals.”

In recent years, new research in evolutionary social psychology and Darwinian anthropology has renewed interest in how evolutionary science might support classical liberalism or traditionalist conservatism.  One sign of this was the special meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society last summer in the Galapagos Islands exploring the topic of “Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty.”

Any renewal of evolutionary conservatism will provoke criticisms from the metaphysical conservatives.  From my experience in defending Darwinian conservatism, the most common criticism is that the naturalist morality of Darwinian science must fail, because a healthy moral order depends necessarily on religion, and particularly on the biblical doctrine that all human beings are created in God’s image and thus endowed by their Creator with equal moral dignity. 

For example, my critics have argued, the moral condemnation of slavery arose from a religious metaphysics that saw slavery as contrary to God’s law.  A purely naturalistic Darwinian morality would not have taught us that slavery is absolutely wrong.

But is this true?  Darwin was a fervent opponent of slavery.  Like Hume and Smith, he saw slavery as a violation of the moral sentiments—particularly, those sentiments that enforce justice as reciprocity. 

From an evolutionary perspective, slavery is a form of social parasitism.  And since human slaves are not naturally adapted to their enslavement, they will resist exploitation, and slaveholders will have to impose their rule over their slaves by force and fraud. 

In the effort to justify slavery, American slaveholders espoused a fraudulent ideology of paternalism that claimed that the slaves were naturally benefited by their enslavement.  The proslavery ideology in the American South asserted that black slaves were physically, morally, and intellectually inferior to whites in their biological nature, and so these black slaves were happier when they were serving white masters.

One of the primary motivations for Darwin’s writing of The Descent of Man was to refute this ideology of scientific racism by showing that all the human races were members of the same human species with the same moral sense that condemned slavery as exploitation.

American Southern conservatives defended slavery as a conservative Christian institution supported by the Bible.  In writing about Southern conservatism, in The Conservative Mind, Kirk warned that “human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon.”  But he never answered the arguments of the Southern Christian conservatives that slavery was biblically sanctioned as part of God’s law.

Richard Weaver admired the “older religiousness” in the American South before the Civil War, and he recognized that part of the Southern religion was faith in the Bible as supporting slavery.  Weaver explained that slavery “is well recognized in the Old Testament, and it is not without endorsement in the New; indeed, a strict constructionist interpretation almost requires its defense.”   So it seems that the “metaphysical dream of the world” in the Old South sanctioned slavery as part of God’s transcendent moral order.

The dispute over the Bible’s handling of the slavery issue divided the Christian churches in America before and during the Civil War.  Americans had looked to the Bible as the revelation of the sacred order of the universe that would resolve all moral disputes by the cosmic authority of God’s law.  But in this greatest moral crisis in American history, the Bible failed to provide any satisfactory answer in the dispute over slavery between North and South.  As Abraham Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address, “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”

In such a situation, human beings must appeal to some natural moral sense like that espoused by Hume, Smith, and Darwin.  Darwinian conservatives can explain this moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature.  Unlike the metaphysical conservatives, who claim that all social order must conform to some supernatural order of intelligent design or divine creation, evolutionary conservatives see social order as the product of ordinary human experience as guided by nature, custom, and prudence.

So as we celebrate the permanent things, let’s not forget the enduring things, which include the enduring human structure of instinctive evolution, cultural evolution, and individual judgment that gives us an enduring standard of natural right.

For those of us who are Darwinian conservatives, that’s enough.

The MPS in the Galapagos (6): Darwinian Liberalism

On the morning of June 25th at the MPS conference, I was the opening lecturer, followed by Kenneth Minogue, and then a general discussion.

I lectured on "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism."  Since my paper is available online, and since I have written an earlier post on this paper, there is no need to summarize it here.

In my oral presentation of the paper, I addressed four (somewhat overlapping) groups of people in the audience--the classical liberals or libertarians, the Kirkians, the Hayekians, and the evolutionary psychologists.

Given the character of the Mont Pelerin Society, I would assume that almost all the members would consider themselves classical liberals or libertarians in some form.  To them, my appeal was to consider how a Darwinian science of human nature could confirm classical liberal thought, particularly as expressed by Adam Smith.  As I have indicated, someone like Charles Murray would seem to agree with me about this.

Although Russell Kirk was never a member of the MPS, many of its members have been identified with the sort of conservative thinking that he promoted.  At the 1957 meeting of the MPS, Hayek gave his famous speech entitled "Why I am not a Conservative," in which he identified himself as a classical liberal rather than as a conservative.  This was thought to be an expression of his disagreement with Kirk's conservatism, although he did not expressly mention Kirk in the speech.  Kirk was present at the meeting, and he reportedly gave an impromptu response.

My argument is that in many respects, Kirk and Hayek were not far apart.  After all, as many people have noted, they both identified themselves as belonging to the intellectual tradition of Edmund Burke.  Moreover, Kirk was a very liberal conservative, in that he clearly did not espouse the kind of theocratic conservatism represented by someone like Joseph de Maistre, and he feared as much as Hayek did the drift towards socialism and statism.

And yet there was one clear point of disagreement between Hayek and Kirk.  As Hayek indicated in his 1957 speech, the Kirkian conservatives rejected Darwinian evolution as a threat to traditional social order, and Hayek saw this as foolishly mistaken.  Furthermore, Hayek thought the case for liberalism was strengthened by a Darwinian understanding of how a free society can arise by spontaneous evolution.

In contrast to Hayek's evolutionary liberalism, Kirk defended a metaphysical and religious version of conservatism.  The first canon of conservative thought, he declared in The Conservative Mind, was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead."  Consequently, "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature."  In later formulations of this first canon, Kirk spoke of the conservative belief in "a transcendent moral order."  In all of his formulations, he connected this principle to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn," and he spoke of Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design."  He mentioned various schools of thought opposed to this conservative thinking, including "those scientific doctrines, Darwinism chief among them, which have done so much to undermine the first principles of a conservative order."

Here in Kirk we see the common fear of many conservatives that Darwinian science denies a conservative order by denying the religious belief in a transcendental order of moral law.  I have tried to allay this fear by arguing that a Darwinian liberalism can recognize the importance of religious belief for moral life as cultivated in the natural and voluntary associations of civil society.  But a Darwinian liberalism will also recognize that the evolved moral sense of human beings can stand on its own natural ground even without religious belief, and that the coercive enforcement of religious belief by the state must be rejected as a threat to liberty.

I will have the chance to continue this discussion with the Kirkian conservatives when I speak at a Regional Meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Atlanta, Georgia, October 4-5.  The theme of the meeting is "The Permanent Things," and it's a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Conservative Mind.  I will be part of a panel on "Human Nature and the Permanent Things."  And I will argue that evolved human nature does provide an enduring, even if not eternal, ground for conservative order.

While indicating my general agreement with Hayek's evolutionary liberalism, I also indicated some points of disagreement--particularly, in his tendency to play up cultural evolution to the exclusion of human nature and human reason, and in his Freudian conception of the free society as requiring a complete suppression of our naturally evolved instincts.

This Hayekian Freudian theme is similar to the idea of "mismatch" coming from the evolutionary psychologists.  As I have already indicated, I find this to be partially true but often exaggerated.  Yes, we are evolved for life in small groups with face-to-face interaction.  But life in small groups is still possible even in the large societies of the modern world.  Moreover, the modern extension of trading relations in global networks of exchange draws on evolved instincts for trading that go back very far into human evolutionary history.

I also questioned the evolutionary psychologists about their commitment to the fact/value distinction.  The presence of Cosmides and Tooby at this conference suggested that they see some connection between evolutionary psychology and classical liberal thought.  And yet they have often said that evolutionary science must be value-free, because moral values are beyond any purely empirical science.  This explains why when Ed Wilson argued for an evolutionary science of morality at the 1996 Meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, he was fervently criticized by the evolutionary psychologists who insisted that this violated the unbridgeable gap between facts and values, is and ought.  If this is true, then an evolutionary science can contribute very little to classical liberalism as a moral and political position, which would suggest that this whole MPS conference on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty" was misconceived!

Ken Minogue's lecture expressed some skepticism about my arguments.  Regrettably, as I have indicated in a previous post, Ken died suddenly during his flight out of the Galapagos at the end of the week, and so I am saddened by the thought that I can't continue my conversations with him.  His lecture seemed to suggest that evolutionary thinking could only subvert traditional moral order.

Various questions were raised in the discussion period.  Some of those questions indicated disagreement with my endorsement of Steven Pinker's argument about the history of declining violence.  For some people in the audience, and for Minogue, it was obvious that "the 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history," and that this was enough to refute Pinker's argument.  As he indicated in his lecture two days later, Deepak Lal thought that Pinker was blind to the fact that the "Long Peace" since World War II has been a product of American imperial dominance of the globe--the Pax Americana.

Another Response to Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur has a post on my reply to his review of Darwinian Conservatism.

He elaborates his argument that libertarianism and traditionalist conservatism are incompatible, and that Darwinian naturalism supports libertarianism but not traditionalist conservatism. His main point is that while the libertarian believes that social order is to be judged by how well it serves the happiness and flourishing of individuals, the conservative believes that individuals are to be judged by how well they serve the stability of social order.

I will concede that Russell Kirk's deep scorn for libertarian thought drove him to describe his Burkean conservatism in a way that drove a wedge between conservatism and libertarianism. But as I have argued in my previous post and in my book, the libertarianism of people like Hayek is actually compatible with Burkean conservatism. Although Hayek did not like to call himself a "conservative," he appealed to Burke throughout his writing, and he insisted that "true individualism" (as opposed to "false individualism") was consistent with Burkean thought.

Like the Burkean conservatives, Hayek repeatedly stressed the need for moral order rooted in tradition or custom to secure the social conditions for liberty. In Individualism and Economic Order, Hayek observed that "coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable" (p. 24). In support of this idea, he quotes Burke: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites." Moreover, Hayek writes, "It must remain an open question whether a free or individualistic society can be worked successfully if people are too 'individualistic' in the false sense, if they are too unwilling voluntarily to conform to traditions and conventions, and if they refuse to recognize anything which is not consciously designed or which cannot be demonstrated as rational to every individual" (p. 26).

For Kirk, the necessary moral traditions were ultimately rooted in some permanent order of the universe manifested in enduring human nature and religious belief in a transcendent order. By contrast, Hayek was a skeptic. And yet he saw no necessary conflict between his classical liberalism and religion. "Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. . . . What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused" (The Constitution of Liberty, p. 407).

This last point leads Sandefur to warn against Kirk as a "theocrat" who "called for an established religion in America." But here I would say that he is not being fair to Kirk. Kirk accepted the First Amendment principle that Congress should not establish a national church. "Christian teaching," Kirk claimed, "is intended to govern the soul, not the state." He warned that it was a mistake for the church to usurp the powers of the state. Although Kirk thought religion was essential for social order, he thought that no particular church should be established by the state, because he believed in religious liberty as a hard-won legacy of the Western tradition.

In listing his "Ten Conservative Principles", Kirk began with the principle of "an enduring moral order" rooted in a constant human nature. Darwinian science supports that principle by accounting for human nature, including the natural moral sense.

As Sandefur indicates, some conservatives are suspicious of Darwinian accounts of human nature as a product of evolutionary history, because they fear that this falls short of the eternal order that they seek. But my claim is that even if Darwinian human nature is not necessarily a fulfillment of some eternal, cosmic purpose, this human nature is still an enduring ground for moral judgment. Moreover, the question of whether this evolutionary nature is guided by some supernatural cause is left open for those who would move beyond nature to nature's God.

Some skeptical libertarians see no need for such a move beyond nature. But shouldn't they see the openness to divine mystery as one of the deepest expressions of individual liberty?

Conservatives (Still) Need Charles Darwin. Responding to the Kirk Center's Conference on Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton

Conservatives need Charles Darwin.

That was the first sentence of my article in the November 2000 issue of First Things.  I argued that conservatives need Darwin because a Darwinian science of human nature supports conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectability and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence.  In his response to my article in the same issue of the journal, Michael Behe (a biologist known for his advocacy of "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian science) complained: "I'm sorry to be blunt, but the notion that Darwinism supports conservatism is absurd."

I elaborated my argument in my book Darwinian Conservatism (2005), and in a second edition of that book with eight critical responses and my replies (2009).  In the fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review, I wrote about "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  I have defended that article against three critics in a post (here).

Over this weekend, I have been thinking about this debate as I pondered the presentations at a conference in Grand Rapids sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal: "Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton."  Although neither Kirk nor Scruton ever moved toward anything like Darwinian conservatism, I see nothing in their defense of traditionalist conservatism that would refute my argument for Darwinian conservatism.  Previously, I have written about some of my points of agreement and disagreement with Kirk and Scruton.  Here I will respond to some of the presentations at the conference.

THE METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM OF CHRISTIAN PLATONISM

James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston) spoke about "The Conservative Defense of Christian Platonism" in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and in the writings of Roger Scruton.  He saw both Burke and Scruton as trying to preserve the Christian-Platonic tradition of Christendom that had dominated Western Civilization until it was overturned by the French Revolution.  While praising both of them for what they tried to do, Wilson thought their undertakings were weakened by their drawing on modern thought that subverted Christian-Platonist thought.  Burke appealed to the sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment when he invoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the foundation of moral experience.  Scruton appealed to Immanuel Kant's Idealism as teaching that while the Ideas of Reason, God, Freedom, and Immortality cannot be proven true by pure reason, we must act "as if" they were true as a necessity of practical reason: these are conscious fictions of the mind.

I believe that Wilson was drawing material from his book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017).  But since I have not read that book, I might not have rightly understood his presentation.

As I have argued in some previous posts, Plato's moral cosmology--particularly in the Republic, the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and The Laws--is so implausible as to be ridiculous, and it's not even clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates meant us to take this seriously.  I have suggested that while Plato might have thought that a teleological cosmology of divinely intelligent design could be a salutary belief for many people, it could not be a rational account of the cosmos for natural philosophers.  Aristotle suggested this in observing that such cosmic myths were little more than traditional folk tales (On the Heavens, 270b1-25, 283b26-284b5, 291b24-292a20, 298b6-299a2; The Movement of Animals, 699b12-31; Metaphysics, 1050b20-25, 1074b1-14).  But perhaps Wilson in his book has answered my objections.

Although much of Burke's Reflections seems to defend a Christian Platonic metaphysics, Wilson observed, this is in tension with Burke's empiricist ethics of moral sentiments that shows the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment.  As I indicated in my Intercollegiate Review article, I agree with this reading of Burke's Reflections, because I see there a tension between the metaphysical conservatism of Burke's moral cosmology of eternal right and wrong and the evolutionary conservatism of his moral anthropology of the moral sentiments.

But unlike Wilson, I don't see Burke's sentimentalism as weakening his argument for Christian Platonism.  In fact, Burke wrote his Reflections as a refutation of Reverend Richard Price's Christian Platonism.  Price contended that moral knowledge was a purely rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God's mind, and that the French Revolution was the historical fulfillment of those eternal truths.  Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke rightly appealed to the natural moral sentiments as the empirical foundation of moral experience.  Later, Darwin adopted this moral sentimentalism as part of his evolutionary account of morality, which was then elaborated by evolutionary psychologists like Edward Westermarck and Darwinian conservatives like James Q. Wilson.

By contrast, James Matthew Wilson scorned moral sentimentalism as mere emotionalism, in which morality is reduced to emotive expressions without any rational apprehension of the human good.  But this ignores the fact that the moral sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment--particularly in the work of Hume and Smith--was a reflective sentimentalism.   As I have indicated, the Scottish sentimentalists did not argue for enslaving reason to emotion, because they actually argued for moral autonomy as the activity of the whole human mind (reason and emotion), in which the mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable.  We can reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether they rest on true or false judgments about the world, and whether they promote or impede our happiness. 

SCRUTON'S CONSERVATISM OF RELIGIOUS ATHEISM

Wilson also criticized Scruton for embracing Kant's Idealism because this modern Idealism contradicts the premodern Idealism of Christian Platonism.  While Kant's ideas are fictional creations of the human mind that do not correspond to any objective reality in the world, Plato's ideas are meant to be intellectual perceptions of what exists in objective reality independently of the human mind.  

As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that Plato believed his Eternal Ideas to be anything more than a noble lie.  After all, in Plato's Parmenides, Plato has Parmenides refute Socrates' theory of the Forms, and Socrates cannot defend his theory against the criticisms; and in fact, nowhere in the Platonic dialogues does anyone satisfactorily reply to the criticisms.

I do agree with Wilson, however, that Scruton does not really affirm the objective truth of Christian Platonist metaphysics, because for Scruton this religious metaphysics is only a fictional creation of the human mind to satisfy a human longing for the divine.  As I have said previously, Scruton makes this clear in his praise for the atheistic religiosity of Richard Wagner's operatic art in the Ring cycle.  Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it." "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols.  Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine.  Art reveals that truth through symbols."  In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions.  Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics."  Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology.  Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning.  And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption. 

The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating.  How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?

Darwinian conservatism offers a better account of the religious longings of the human animal.  As I have argued previously, Darwin was a zetetic philosophic scientist who recognized that the natural desire for religious transcendence was part of evolved human nature; and while Darwin himself took the side of reason in the reason/revelation debate, he knew that reason could not refute revelation.  He knew that the "mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us."  In the search for ultimate explanation, the philosophic scientist must assume that nature is the uncaused cause of everything; and yet he cannot refute the claim of the religious believer that God is the uncaused cause of nature.  Darwin conceded this in accepting the principle of dual causality, which recognizes natural evolution as the "secondary cause" of everything, while admitting that behind or above nature there might be a Divine First Cause.  Thus, Darwin saw that he had to remain open to the possibility of theistic evolution:  God does not have to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create every species, because God can choose to act through natural evolution to carry out his creative plan.

This supports a conservative view of religion.  The Darwinian scientist respects religious belief in revelation as satisfying the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence.  But the Darwinian scientist must also insist that since neither side in the reason/revelation debate can refute the other, and since the disagreement among believers in their interpretations of revelation make it impossible to identify the one true religion, the best regime must secure the freedom of thought and speech that promotes the reason/revelation debate and respects religious pluralism.

To be continued . . .

Mark Henrie's Traditionalist Conservatism

I have defended Darwinian conservatism as a fusion of libertarian conservatism and traditionalist conservatism. Libertarians like Timothy Sandefur have objected that my Darwinian science supports libertarianism but not traditional conservatism. My responses to Sandefur can be found here, here, and here. In general, I have found that traditionalist conservatives are far more suspicious of Darwinian conservatism than are libertarians. And I am sure that Sandefur would say that that confirms his argument. But I persist in my thought that American conservatism really does require a fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism, and that Darwinian science sustains that fusion by supporting the common ground of conservative thought, which is a conception of human nature as imperfect in knowledge and virtue.

Mark Henrie has written an excellent essay on traditionalist conservatism, which can be found here. Much of what I have written in response to Sandefur would apply to Henrie as well.

Although Henrie stresses the differences between the traditional conservatism of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and the classical liberalism or libertarianism of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, Henrie acknowledges that Burke was a Whig, and that Kirk's Burkean tradition is actually a "liberal conservatism" that combines liberty and tradition. To me, this points to conservative fusionism. Despite their personal disagreements, Hayek and Kirk had much in common. After all, Hayek identified himself as a Burkean Whig. And this commonality between Hayek and Kirk was similar to the commonality between Adam Smith and Burke.

Henrie speaks about the need for "boxing in liberalism," which resembles Peter Lawler's phrase about "putting Locke in the Locke box." A traditionalist like Henrie is not a complete reactionary (like Joseph de Maistre), who would go back to medieval absolutism and theocracy. But neither is he a complete liberal who erects liberal individualism as the only principle of the good. Henrie writes: "Liberal conservatism does not dogmatically reject the role of individual consent in politics, but nevertheless retains a conviction that the human world cannot be wholly reconceived or reconstructed on that principle."

I agree with this, and I would say that this is what Hayek called "true individualism" as opposed to "false individualism." "True individualism" recognizes the need for private property, religious liberty, and limited government as conforming to the imperfections of human nature. We cannot trust anyone with absolute power, which tends to corrupt. But individual liberty is a means rather than an end. It provides the conditions within which human beings can pursue the human good as the satisfaction of their natural human desires. Darwinian science confirms this by showing that human beings by nature pursue a wide range of natural desires, and thus a good society is one that allows human beings to pursue that human good.

As Henrie indicates, a traditionalist conservative believes that the pursuit of the human good requires family life, moral education, religious belief, and private property. Darwinian conservatism shows how those conditions are rooted in the evolved nature of human beings.

Henrie indicates that traditionalist conservatives like Kirk often expressed a nostalgic sympathy for the cause of the antebellum South. And yet he insists that Southern conservatives do not lament the passing of slavery. Is that true? Kirk often praised John C. Calhoun, and Calhoun praised slavery as a "positive good." In fact, he insisted, the liberty of the slaveholders depended on the existence of slavery. Did Kirk ever denounce slavery? Did he ever explain why the proslavery Southerners were wrong? Did he ever indicate how they were mistaken in appealing to Biblical religion as supporting slavery? Why is Henrie so evasive about this great moral issue?

With respect to foreign affairs, Henrie suggests that traditionalist conservatives are suspicious of the Wilsonian idealism and messianic rhetoric that have led to the Iraq war. But, again, here is another point of agreement with the libertarian conservatives, because they too have been deeply skeptical about the democratic imperialism of Bush's foreign policy. And, as I have indicated in various posts on this blog, Darwinian conservatism would tend to recognize the Iraq war as a utopian folly that caters to the glory-seeking ambition of the presidency--or what Harvey Mansfield foolishly praises as "manly nihilism."

Slavery, Southern Conservatism, and Darwinian Natural Right

"Slavery is a conservative institution."

"Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon."

The first quotation is from Thomas R. R. Cobb's Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States (1858). The second is from Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind (1953). A Darwinian conception of natural right supports Kirk against Cobb.

Kirk's remark comes in his section on the "Southern conservatism" of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun. Kirk argues that their Southern tradition of conservatism has never recovered from their imprudence in defending slavery. Elsewhere, Kirk praises Abraham Lincoln for his prudent statesmanship in his handling of slavery and the Civil War. But Kirk never explains exactly why the proslavery position was imprudent. I would say that Lincoln was a prudent statesman because he never lost slight of the evil of slavery as violating natural right, while Calhoun defended slavery as a "positive good." This moral blindness on Calhoun's part crippled him in a way that prevented him from being a truly prudent statesman.

Calhoun's "positive good" defense of slavery is elaborated in Cobb's book, which is the only legal treatise on slavery written by a Southerner. Cobb was a prominent lawyer and law professor in Georgia who helped to write the Confederate Constitution. As a summary of the proslavery position, Cobb argues that slavery conforms to both natural law and divine law. Slavery is natural because negroes are natural slaves who are physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to whites, and thus the enslavement of negroes improves them and makes them happy. He finds a counterpart to negro slavery in the slavery of ants. "It is a fact, well known to entomologists, and too well established to admit of contradiction, that the red ant will issue in regular battle array, to conquer and subjugate the black or negro ant, as he is called by entomologists. And, that these negro slaves perform all the labor of the communities into which they are thus brought, with a patience and an aptitude almost incredible." Cobb does recognize the humanity of the negro as "a man, endowed with reason, will, and accountability." And yet he accepts the arguments of the scientific racists who claimed that the black race was naturally inferior in its physical, intellectual, and moral traits.

By contrast, Charles Darwin was a fervent opponent of slavery who rejected the attempts of the scientific racists to justify slavery as natural. Pierre Huber was the first naturalist to observe and write about slavery among ants in 1810. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin reported his own studies of ant slavery and offered a theory of how it could have evolved by natural selection. But he did not see this as a natural counterpart to human slavery.

In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I have suggested that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities indicate that slavery among ants and humans is rooted in a natural inclination to social parasitism in which slavemakers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation. The differences indicate that the uniquely human opposition to slavery is rooted in a natural moral sense that resists exploitation, because human beings are naturally inclined to detect and punish exploitation. In The Descent of Man, Darwin gives his account of how that natural moral sense evolved as part of human nature.

Some of the opponents of Darwinian moral naturalism insist that morality requires a transcendent source in religious belief. But in this debate over slavery, we see that such religious belief--at least as coming from Biblical revelation--does not provide us reliable moral guidance. Cobb was able to show that the Bible--both the Old Testament and the New Testament--sanctioned slavery. (Recent books by Mark Noll and Eugene Genovese have surveyed the history of Southern proslavery arguments based on the Bible.) If the Bible cannot resolve such a moral debate, then we have to appeal to our natural moral experience that does not depend on religious belief. Darwinian science indicates how such moral experience might be founded in our evolved human nature.

The prudent statesmanship desired by conservatives requires some standard of natural right as providing the moral compass for political judgment about great questions such as slavery. Darwinian natural right sustains such statesmanship.

Fusionism, Again

I have been responding in various ways to Timothy Sandefur's claim that my account of conservatism as a fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism must be incoherent.

I agree that if one looks superficially at the debates between extreme libertarians like Murray Rothbard and extreme traditionalists like Russell Kirk, there seems to be a great gulf between them. But if one looks more carefully at some of their writings, such as those that can be found here, here, and here, one begins to see that they share much in common.

The problem is that both sides in this debate tend to criticize straw-men. In fact, Rothbard complains that to say that libertarians elevate individual liberty to "the status of an absolute end" is "an absurd straw-man." "Only an imbecile could ever hold that freedom is the highest or indeed the only principle or end of life," Rothbard explains. "Freedom is necessary to, and integral with, the achievement of any of man's ends. The libertarian agrees completely with Acton and with Meyer himself that freedom is the highest political end, not the highest end of man per se; indeed, it would be difficult to render such a position in any sense meaningful or coherent."

Similarly, for the libertarians to criticize the traditionalist conservatives like Kirk as "statists" who would allow an authoritarian state to suppress individual liberty is also a "straw-man" argument. After all, Kirk is clear in stating that libertarians and traditionalists agree in their distaste for statist collectivism. "They set their faces against the totalist state and the heavy hand of bureaucracy."

Unfortunately, Kirk creates confusion when he writes: "The libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor. But the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God." This seems to support the idea that Kirk's traditionalism is "statist." But then a few pages later in the same essay, Kirk rejects "the pretensions of the modern state to omnicompetence." He goes on to explain: "The primary function of government, the conservatives say, is to keep the peace: by repelling foreign enemies, by maintaining the bed of justice domestically. When government goes much beyond this end, it falls into difficulty, not being contrived for the management of the whole of life."

The fundamental point here is to distinguish society from the state and to see that between the individual and the state is the realm of civil society--the realm of families, churches, economic associations, social groups of all kinds--all of those natural and voluntary groups in which the natural sociality of human beings is expressed.

Darwinian science supports the primacy of civil society as the fullest manifestation of the social instincts of human beings--instincts of attachment that arise first in the family and then extend outward to ever wider circles of social bonding. The bureaucratic state can, at best, secure some of the conditions for the cooperative relationships of civil society by keeping the peace, protecting private property, and enforcing a general rule of law.

But to assume that moral community has to be artificially created by the social engineering of a centralized, bureaucratic state is dangerously utopian, because it ignores the fact that since human beings are imperfect in their knowledge and virtue, they cannot be trusted with centralized power. Moreover, we should assume that the natural desire for political rule and high rank will incline those with power to be ambitious in their quest for domination. What John Adams called "the principle of balance" should lead us to separate and balance political powers so that ambitious people can satisfy their natural desire to rule, while being checked in their power so as to minimize the danger of tyranny.

The enforcement of morality comes best from the social sanctions of family life and civil society rather than the political sanctions of a centralized state. Thus, libertarians and traditionalists can agree that the highest end of politics is liberty, while the highest end of civil society is the ordering of liberty through moral habituation.

A Thousand Posts (5)

2013
This was the year of my Darwinian Grand Tour--from Chicago to the Galapagos to Houston to Atlanta to Freiburg, and a few places in between. 

In April, I presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Convention in Chicago on "Nietzsche's Darwinian Liberalism." 

In June, I was travelling in Peru, Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands.  The trip to the Galapagos began with a week-long yacht tour of five of the larger islands, followed by a week in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on the island of San Cristobal, where I participated in the Mont Pelerin Society meetings on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty."  For those MPS meetings, I wrote a paper on "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism." 

In October, I lectured at Lone Star College-Kingwood, where John Barr was teaching a remarkable course entitled "The Emancipators: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and the Making of the Modern World." 

Also in October, I spoke at the Philadelphia Society meeting on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things" in Atlanta. 

In December, I went to Freiburg, Germany, where I lectured for a workshop on "Liberalism and the Evolutionary Agenda," organized by Ulrich Witt, the Director of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max Planck Institute (Jena). 

I saw the MPS meetings and the Freiburg workshop as especially important moments in the recent intellectual history of evolutionary classical liberalism.

January 1 was the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and so I began the year with a post on "Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in Evolutionary History," in which I showed how Lincoln's classical liberalism was based on an evolutionary understanding of human history.

Then, I wrote a long series of posts on Nietzsche (from January to April, in September, and in December).  This work on Nietzsche was connected with my graduate seminar on Nietzsche that I taught in the fall semester.

My main argument is that the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period (1878-1882)--particularly, Human, All Too Human (1878)--is superior to Nietzsche's earlier and later writings. 

I first began to see this from my reading of Lou Salome's book on Nietzsche, the first book ever written on Nietzsche, and in some ways still the best book.  Lou had insights that came from her brief friendship with Nietzsche (April to October, 1882), when Nietzsche repeatedly proposed marriage, and she turned him down.  She saw that once Nietzsche broke off his friendships with her and Paul Ree, he moved away from the evolutionary science that dominated his middle period.

The Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period is morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the mythic metaphysics of his early and late writings.  This Darwinian science is morally superior because it promotes a sober morality of moderation that restrains tendencies to intoxicated extremism.  This science is politically superior because it promotes a prudent respect for liberal democracy that restrains tendencies to tyrannical power-seeing.  And this science is intellectually superior because it can be grounded in empirical evidence and methodical reasoning rather than the delusions of enthusiastic fantasizing.  In contrast to the Darwinian science of the middle period, the distinctive teachings of the late Nietzsche--the will to power, eternal return, and the Ubermensch--are morally corrupting, politically dangerous, and intellectually confused.

In Nietzsche's later writings, we can see how the Darwinian refutation of the universe as a moral cosmology provoked a turn to art and an atheistic religiosity as mythmaking to escape from this "deadly truth."

The attraction of Nietzsche's later writings and rejection of the free-spirited evolutionary science of his middle period is evident among the Nazis and the Straussians.

I wrote a series of posts on Nietzsche's "Sociobiology of Animal Morality" and on his "Aristocratic Liberalism."

I use the term "aristocratic liberalism" to convey the thought that while a liberal regime secures equal liberty under the rule of law, it also thereby secures inequality of results in allowing for "the natural aristocracy of virtues and talents" (as Thomas Jefferson called it).  Aristocratic liberalism can thus combine the ancient concern for social virtue and the modern concern for individual liberty.  The aristocratic liberalism of Nietzsche's middle period is in contrast to the aristocratic anti-liberalism of his later writings.

Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism can be sketched out as four affirmations and four negations:  affirming constitutional democracy, liberal pluralism, religious liberty, and cosmopolitan globalization, while denying socialist statism, "great politics," anti-Semitism, and atheistic religiosity.

Nietzsche's evolutionary aristocratic liberalism is very similar to what Douglass North and his colleagues identify as the modern "open access society," which was the subject of a post in April.

Also in April, I defended Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism in his middle period as superior to the aristocratic radicalism that Bruce Detwiler saw in Nietzsche's later period.  Detwiler failed to see that his good criticisms of Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism don't apply to Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism.  Detwiler also failed to see how that aristocratic liberalism was rooted in the Darwinian science that Nietzsche embraced in his middle period.

I also pointed out that Strauss failed to see how his account of Nietzsche as surfing the "third wave of modernity" that led to Nazism does not apply to the Darwinian liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings.

In the first half of July, I wrote a series of 6 posts as "An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos" that was based on my tour of the islands on the Cormorant.  (In early February of 2017, I did a second tour of the Galapagos on the Cormorant; and I wrote another series of 12 posts on "Thinking About Galapagos.")

In the second half of July, I wrote a series of 14 posts on the lectures and discussions at the Mont Pelerin Society conference.  The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1946 by Friedrich Hayek as an organization for people who wanted to think about classical liberalism in the modern world.  Hayek saw classical liberalism as rooted in an evolutionary science of liberty and spontaneous order.  In recent years, there has been growing interest in how contemporary sociobiology and evolutionary science might apply to Hayek's evolutionary conception of liberalism.  This was the concern of the MPS meetings in the Galapagos, which brought together some of the leading evolutionary scientists and classical liberal thinkers. 

In my paper for the conference--"The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism"--I argued that evolutionary moral psychology has largely confirmed the truth of the liberalism defended by Adam Smith and Hayek.  But I also argued that Hayek's socialist "atavism" thesis--that socialism appeals to our evolved instincts, but liberalism does not--is mistaken.  I made the same argument at the Freiburg workshop.

From the end of July into the first week of August, I wrote a series of 6 posts on the book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension, edited by Stephen Dilley, which had recently been published by Lexington Books.  Of the 13 authors in this book, 9 are opponents of Darwinian classical liberalism, and most of their criticisms are directed at me.  2 of the authors seem neutral, and 2 seem to be defenders (somewhat) of Darwinian liberalism.

The argument that seems to be embraced by the nine critics can be called Dilley's Syllogism, because it's stated by Dilley in his introductory chapter:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

Consequently, the nine critics are proponents of what they call "Christian classical liberalism" or "theistic classical liberalism."  They also identify this with the liberal political thought of the American founders, and so they defend "the rich theistic classical liberalism embodied in the American founding."  I have inserted "Lockean" into the syllogism because the nine critics generally appeal to John Locke as "the quintessential classical liberal," although they also often identify Adam Smith as a paradigmatic classical liberal.

The nine critics say that they are attacking "Darwinian conservatism," which "integrates a Darwinian conception of human nature with the essentials of classical liberalism, drawing on the work of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and others."  They identify the most prominent proponents of Darwinian conservatism as me, Thomas Sowell, Robert McShea, James Q. Wilson, Michael Shermer, and Francis Fukuyama.  Most of their attacks, however, are directed at me.

Most of the nine critics are associated with the Discovery Institute, and most of what they say conforms to the famous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute, which lays out a strategy for saving Christian civilization from the moral and political degradation promoted by Darwinian science, a strategy that depends on "intelligent design theory" as the alternative to Darwinian evolution.

In my series of posts, I answer their criticisms.

One of my posts on the MPS meetings was on Richard Wrangham's lecture on his "chimpanzee model" for explaining the evolution of war.  This is part of an intense debate among biologists and social scientists over whether Hobbes was right that the state of nature is a state of war or whether Rousseau was right that it was a state of peace.  Those on the Hobbesian side think that war has been natural for chimpanzees and human foragers.  Those on the Rousseauean side deny this. 

Although I agree with Wrangham and lean towards the Hobbesian side, I argue that the opponents in this debate end up agreeing on a position that is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauean but Lockean.  Thus does the evolutionary anthropology of war and peace confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of government.  Hobbes was partly right.  Rousseau was mostly wrong. And Locke was mostly right.  I wrote posts on this in August and September.  (This became part of my paper "The Biopolitical Science of Locke's State of Nature" that I presented at the 2015 meetings of the American Political Science Association.)

I have written a long series of posts on the evolution of war among chimps and humans (August of 2013, September and November of 2014, June of 2015, January of 2016).

In September and October, I wrote about my participation in the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Atlanta on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things."

In my lecture, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not permanent is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.

That’s not enough, however, for a metaphysical conservatism that appeals to a transcendent moral cosmology of eternal order as intelligently designed by the Creator.

This contrast between evolutionary conservatism and metaphysical conservatism was displayed in the debate between Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk at the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. 

At the Philadelphia Society meeting, I was disturbed by how many of the speakers assumed a divine command theory of ethics, so that we cannot know what is right or wrong except by obeying God's commands, particularly in the Hebrew Bible.  As I suggested in my remarks, this is dangerous, because it would mean accepting slavery and the brutal despotism of Mosaic law.

Almost all of the speakers at the meeting were uncritical in their praise of Kirk.  The only critics were me and Alan Charles Kors.  Kors is a prominent historian at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his studies of the intellectual history of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.  Kors defended the French Enlightenment, which was a bold move before an audience of Kirkian conservatives.  I defended Friedrich Hayek's evolutionary conservatism as an alternative to Kirk's metaphysical conservatism.

Kors and I were in complete agreement.  That might seem odd, particularly since Hayek presented his Burkean evolutionary conservatism as rooted in the British and Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the French Enlightenment. 

But Kors argued that what Burkean conservatives criticize as the excesses of the French Revolution--the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror--manifest the intellectual legacy of Rousseau rather than the philosophes.  After all, Rousseau was a vehement opponent of the philosophes.  Leaders of the French Enlightenment like Voltaire and Montesquieu opposed every form of despotism and supported the tolerance, liberty, and commercial spirit that they saw in Great Britain.  Robespierre's "Republic of Virtue" was inspired not by the thought of Voltaire or Montesquieu but by Rousseau's Social Contract.  For example, Robespierre's "Religion of the Supreme Being" was explicitly an attempt to enforce Rousseau's teaching that all citizens must embrace a deistic religion, and that neither atheists nor Christians can be true citizens.

In his speech, Kors often referred to Hayek in ways that suggested that most of French Enlightenment thought was in agreement with Hayek's evolutionary liberalism, which I defended in my speech.

In December, I wrote 6 posts on the Freiburg workshop on liberalism and evolution.

One of the benefits for me of this workshop was that it helped me to think through my ambivalence about Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.  I am persuaded by Hayek's claim that Darwinian science supports the fundamental idea of classical liberalism that social order--including morals, markets, and laws--can arise as a largely spontaneous  or unintended order from the interactions of individuals acting to satisfy their individual desires.  But I am not persuaded by Hayek's account of exactly how cultural evolution produces the modern liberal order. 

My conclusion is that we need to see how Darwinian science corrects the mistakes in Hayek's account while confirming Hayek's insight about how liberal thought can be rooted in an evolutionary science of spontaneous order.  Naomi Beck was one of the participants in the workshop, and I saw her critique of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism as reinforcing this conclusion.

At least half or more of the participants were proponents of Hayekian classical liberalism who were interested in the possibility of grounding liberalism in evolutionary science, although they were unsure as to whether Hayek was correct in the details of his evolutionary theory of liberalism.  A few of the participants--including Beck--were opponents of Hayek and of liberalism in general.  This was similar to the situation at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in the Galapagos Islands last summer, where much of the discussion turned on the assessment of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.

In the discussions at the MPS meetings and at the Freiburg workshop, I criticized Hayek’s suggestion that the market order requires a suppression of our natural human desires.  This is what I have identified as Hayek’s Freudian theory of human evolution, in which civilization requires the repression of our evolved human instincts.  Here is where Hayek’s argument for liberalism becomes incoherent.  

If a liberal society is so painful because it requires the suppression of our deepest natural instincts, why does it succeed?  And if a socialist society satisfies our deepest natural instincts, why does it fail?  

As I have indicated in various posts, I see the same incoherence in the “mismatch theory” of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.  At the MPS meeting, Cosmides and Tooby indicated their agreement with Hayek on this point.  At times, they seemed to say that Karl Marx was right about the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherers, but at other times, they seemed to say that Marx was wrong, because even hunter-gatherers show only conditional sharing or reciprocation, and therefore their sharing is not indiscriminate.  Moreover, Tooby and Cosmides seemed to agree with John Locke and Adam Smith in seeing trading behavior in hunter-gatherers that would provide the natural basis for the modern commercial society.

At the Freiburg workshop, I agreed with Naomi Beck in criticizing Hayek for not reading Darwin and considering his theory of cultural evolution.  Remarkably, Hayek in The Fatal Conceit dismisses Darwin as having nothing important to say about cultural evolution, although Hayek never cites Darwin, and thus leaves the reader with the suspicion that Hayek never read Darwin. 

Darwin's Descent of Man offers an elaborate account of the evolution of morality that should have been important for Hayek.  Darwin presents the evolution of morality as moving through three interacting levels--natural instincts, cultural traditions, and individual reason.  To me, this seems more reasonable than Hayek's attempt to deny instinct and reason in elevating culture as the only ground of morality.  That was one of my arguments in my paper for the Freiburg workshop.

A portion of my Freiburg paper was published in the Journal of Bioeconomics (2015) 17:3-15.  I reprinted this as a post in May of 2015.

I have written many posts on how Darwinian biology supports Aristotelian teleology. One of the best of these posts was written in September with the title "The Biological Teleology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand."  It highlights the remarkable work of Allan Gotthelf in showing how Darwinian evolutionary biology restored Aristotelian teleology to biology and thus showed how modern biology can sustain Aristotelian natural right.  Strauss claimed that the "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."  Gotthelf demonstrated that Strauss was mistaken about this.

In October and November, I wrote some posts on the foolishness of longing for immortality and the wisdom of Wallace Stevens' insight that "death is the mother of beauty."

I also wrote some posts on music--Wagner's Die Meistersinger (February) and Parsifal (November) and Handel's Messiah (December).