The Bradley Lecture - December 9, 2002
American Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC
Lionel Tiger
Rutgers University
That relentless sceptic
Bertrand Russell once announced that "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed
by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a
summer day." In a scientifically-driven period of history such as the one
we're in, even more perilous are convictions which purport to deliver certainty
as well as comfort. While science is by definition and intent designed to
be questioned both by its practitioners and its consumers, it's clear that
the value of its results may be sharply affected by the plausibility of
its initial assumptions and how searchingly it evaluates information. The
English economist Alfred Marshall observed that "the most reckless theorists
are those who allow the facts to speak for themselves."
Of course this is dangerous. Getting things right matters. I want here to
deal with old assumptions, new facts, and what should be done about them.
My principal focus is on the set of working principles and facts speaking
for themselves which compose the idea of "human nature." And to do this
I have to begin with the strange feature of modern as well as old universities
which is that the natural and social sciences are separate operations. Not
only do they usually occupy different real estate but their intellectual
operations are often quarantined from each other conceptually and in day-to-day
practice.
However think about how strange this is. Does the fact that natural science
is one thing and social science another mean that social behavior is somehow
not natural? For nearly all educational and research institutions the answer
to that question is Yes. Perhaps vaguely, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps
casually or perhaps assertively - but still Yes. The consequences are enormous
not only for science itself but for social policy, legal theory, ethical
analysis, and our understanding of the sources of pleasure and pain.
All this is the subject of my aria today.
It's not a new song. Aristotle proclaimed that "Man is by nature a political
animal" and he meant it. But the political scientists and other social scientists
who followed him largely focused on the word "political." They ignored virtually
altogether the most important and arresting phrase "by nature."
While one shouldn't take the liberty of imposing on someone else's pleasure
centers, nonetheless I can imagine that Aristotle would have been delighted
with the human genome project and would have endorsed the front page placement
of the New York Times story of December 5 2002 which described the full
explication of the mouse genome. This is interesting in itself but became
even more so because it appears that of the 30,000 genes possessed by the
mouse, only about 300 - 1 percent - have no obvious counterpart in the human
genome. Given that we and our apparent cousins the mice have been evolving
separately for 75 million years, this is remarkable. It suggests in both
real and metaphoric terms that our biological reach into history and prehistory
can be seen as comparable to the manner in which rocks and papayas and wood
and asparagus all share the elemental units which physics has identified.
Mouse nature? Human nature? So far, and yet so near. And yet I dare say
that it remains overwhelmingly the case in the social sciences that almost
everywhere it is possible to receive a doctoral degree without studying
any other species than the human. Even at that the work is likely to involve
people and their behavior in the past generation and in a highly limited
geographical area. This is wholly understandable but intellectually it is
akin to studying geology but exclusively about Minnesota. Or even doing
botany while ignoring photosynthesis.
There are two very over-concise reasons I will sketch to identify the basis
for the segregation of social science from biology. The first has to do
with a broad allergy to "reductionism" - in effect trying to explain a social
phenomenon by a physical or genetic cause. Perhaps the principal statement
of this was - not surprising this - from a Frenchman Emile Durkheim. He
issued his influential book THE RULES OF SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD around the
turn of the last century which established reductionism as a major error
and recommended that the social sciences distance themselves from the biological
- even though (or perhaps because) his principal teacher Espinas was himself
a biologist. This anti-reductionism ethic diffused widely. Not only did
it serve te normal purposes of relatively imperialistic academic disciplines
seeking greater resources and autonomy, but it also wholly supported the
long-standing divide in the societies involved between humans and other
animals.
The more recent and fiercer reason had to do with the appropriation of some
biological and much non-biological materials by various fascist groups especially
of course the Nazis. Thereafter there was plausible and understandable suspicion
of attributing to genes any major social or cultural phenomena. Of course
the intellectual baby was thrown out with the acrid bathwater, and the study
of links between genes and human nature became exceptionally torrid and
academically dangerous to boot. It remains a highly sensitive matter and
a bulwark of the PC priesthood's catechism. And of course in the USA the
intellectual mess was abetted when the original legislation dealing with
affirmative action in its various modes was extended from race to include
sex - evidently as a farcical suggestion since several Southern congressmen
were convinced the entire bill was foolish and unpassable. But race and
sex are apples and oranges. The differences between races first of all vary
in a gradient from all-one to nearly-everything. Secondly they reflect relatively
minor differences in the actual conduct of lives. However the sexes differ
enormously and it is unnecessary to recall here the immense catalogue of
defined sex differences from the level of the cell to - even just in yesterday's
news - an indication that among vervet monkeys males and females make the
same sex-typed choices of toys as human children do - without benefit of
GI Joe, Barbie, and the dread power source - role models.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the communist left, human nature
as an idea was anathema too, because of course the prevailing rule was that
ideology conquered all. A new soviet or Chinese man or woman would follow
the correct guidance of the enlightened party in the name of the almighty
founding principles. A kind of Skinnerian environmentalism united communist
and social science theory even if this was hardly comprehended by our colleagues
annoying pigeons and nocturnal mice in expensive labs off Harvard Square
- the experimenters woke up the mice and then made them do what they do
anyway at night - run mazes. On the basis of such operations, huge learning
theories were erected. At one point, B.F. Skinner himself asked the question
- which he then ignored - "what's in the rat?"
These learning theories animated a huge structure of belief in the decisive
role of the environment in shaping behavior and the minimal role of anything
approximating "human nature." Of course with the fall of communism the intellectual
certainty of half the world dissolved overnight. The results of 70 years
of role models (again that awful phrase and worse concept), ideal institutions,
and programs for human perfection were swept away in less time than it takes
for an unpopular sitcom to be canceled by the Disney Corporation. All that
certainty, all that propaganda, all that effort....
I was in Korea several weeks ago and had read before the trip a memoir of
a North Korean refugee who described standing atop the tallest building
in Seoul and marveling that all the people he saw managed to make choices
in what to do, where to go, what to buy, with whom to speak, without anyone
telling them, which had been his experience in North Korea. Of course. People
like to do things, they move around, they have projects, affinities, they
blunder. So do mice and chimps. Variation is the name of the game of nature.
As I tell students, when they study living systems the shortest analytic
distance between two points is a normal curve. Not only do people vary amongst
themselves - and recall that Darwin's central insight was about the role
of variation - but so do groups vary. This has led some social scientists
to suffer from what my colleague Robin Fox calls "ethnographic dazzle" in
which the fact of difference overwhelms the equal fact of consistent central
patterns.
Now the overwhelming weight of new work makes it imperative we go beyond
the errors and allergies of the past and try to fashion as sophisticated
a knowledge of human nature as we have been able to do acquire about nature
itself.
So let me move directly to do this, and first describe how.
In l966 Robin Fox then of the London School of Economics and I published
a wholly impudent paper in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
called "The Zoological Perspective in Social Science." It was all of 9 pages
but I think we got it largely right. Then in l971 Fox and I, both then at
Rutgers, published The Imperial Animal in which we used the exciting linguistic
work by Chomsky on the necessity for a genetic basis for language - otherwise
language is too hard for little kids to learn; there had to be a hard-wired
program for it. Different communities taught different languages but Language
was the same.
We broadened the discussion to other - earlier - elements of social behavior
- after all language is a relatively recent human innovation. We called
the phenomenon the "behavioral biogrammar" which was a device enabling us
to look for human regularities in the production of behavior just as there
were clearly regularities in the production of language. Fox and I and countless
others have carried on this exploration with various levels of self-consciousness
and intellectual aggression and the result is a new state of play. The most
recent full approach to the matter is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate -
who as a former student of Chomsky's could have put the biogrammar concept
to good and labor-saving use. But there are dozens of others, including
Paul Rubin's analysis of biological factors in economics which was the subject
of a recent symposium here at AEI.
What do we get out of this? Let me use physiology as my baseline. We all
know that the body needs certain inputs in order to function and the medical
community has accordingly developed what we know as an ideal nutritional
profile - this much vitamin A, this much C, that much protein, this much
green vegetable and colorful fruit. Elements of this remain controversial
especially since the body has become the most sturdy temple for moral self-assessment.
So now virtually everyone is obsessed with the food they eat. Diet books
face their enemy cook books across bookstore aisles Many people act as if
they think that what they eat will kill them. They employ an extermination
model of food. Others see their exquisite choice of tasteless rain-forest
mung beans as a sure-fire evasion of the otherwise grim grip of the mortal
coil. Nevertheless there is a fairly agreed-upon general idea of what the
body needs and how it should be cared for.
The body is the structure. Structure and function are almost invariably
related. Behavior is the function. So let's turn to behavior and develop
a portfolio of behavioral vitamins which individuals and the body-social
need.
Why vitamins? One alternative to that term is "rights" but I gather this
causes lawyers and judges to jump up and down with turbulent anxiety. This
is always an expensive and unnerving prospect and you do not want to irritate
these people. Another alternative is "needs." But that is too Dickensian
for something as agreeable as what make social life agreeable. There is
also always the danger the management of these needs will be coopted by
the always-hungry always well-meaning corps of concernocrats ready and willing
to rummage in the lives of others.
So behavioral vitamins it is.
Now for purposes of this exercise suddenly we become our own zookeepers.
Modern zookeepers are evaluated by how faithful are the conditions they
provide their guests to those in which they evolved and whether they are
able to reproduce. So allow me to provide a list of behavioral vitamins
which we should provide each other as we supervise our own zoo, a list based
on a broad assessment of the human biogrammar rather than on any pre-existing
scheme of morality, piety, and severity. It is based that is on what we
needed to prosper as a species in our own native environment which was of
course East Africa from which it appears our ancestors spread around 100,000
years ago; our real roots are there. It's the Old Country, back home, back
east.
This is a simpleton's list, banal, a bit cheerful, low-cost, and it requires
no post-graduate degree for its discussion.
I will however indulge in a minor form of grandiosity because I will describe
these vitamin requirements as commandments. But since there are only nine,
it's clearly an amateur list.
1)The first vitamin is the opportunity to be protected by rules about maturity.
That is 3-year olds do not and should not have the same package of rights
and responsibilities as 30 -year olds. It's a good bet that responses to
immaturity are rather deeply programmed genomically, and legal systems customarily
respond to this program. The outrage over priestly abuse of youngsters is
only an especially poignant and dramatic example of this.
2) In order to indulge in agreeable behavior, we should enjoy the vitamin
of access to fresh air and natural light. In various societies such as Sweden
and Japan, and S. Korea as I recently learned, access to light has a defined
economic value. In some places office buildings may not be built with offices
without windows to the outside for all employees. Devotees of torture and
solitary confinement are particularly attached to deprivation of these vitamins
because they know from experience how effective it is.
3) Greenery is a vitamin. If this were a class of baby students I would
ask "how many of you have houseplants" and a huge majority would say Yes.
Humans evolved in nature and we try to import the upper paleolithic into
our high-rise apartments by buying plants whose only serious function is
aesthetic. Here in frozen central Washington, there are flower shops every
second block. Furthermore, people who live in houses with greenery already
around them create yet more in the form of gardens, and gardening is currently
the most popular American recreation. Part of the human nature project is
a new bed of summer herbs, and even, heaven forbid, zucchini. (Whoever eats
all that zuchinni?)
4) The opportunity for large-muscle movements is a vitamin. Even prisoners
are entitled to an hour in the yard. But there is ongoing curtailment in
American schools of the opportunities for play involving large-muscle movements,
bodily movements over space, and the conduct of lively games many of which
by preference appear to be competitive. This is both a reflection of fears
of lawsuits against schoolboards, teachers, equipment makers, and the like,
but it reflects an anti-male bias by feminizing school systems. These have
clearly been configured more to female than male nature and one result is
that females are decisively more successful in the system academically as
well as emotionally- in colleges and universities there are some 57% females
to 43% males.
In a different but related realm, there is also apparently a 9 to 1 ratio
of male to female victims of Ritalin and similar behavioral management drugs.
Perhaps because males throughout the primates like to move around more than
females, human ones in particular are being penalized for their nature.
They are required to become drug-users by those responsible for their welfare.
Obviously such drugs are useful for some individuals. But it becomes highly
suspicious when the sex ratio of prescriptions is so remarkably skewed.
Is this about the students, or about the system they're in? These issues
are more fully explored in my THE DECLINE OF MALES of 1999
. 5) Almost everyone when they return home tonight will check whatever device
they use for messages or email. Social contact is a vitamin. Again, managers
of solitary confinement understand how debilitating it is. Good zoos provide
opportunities for animals to communicate with their fellows - they like
it, even if they squabble. So the ability to communicate with members of
our species is a vitamin. It may also take the form of freedom of expression,
one variant of it. It also applies to the issue of censorship: who if anyone
should decide what communication one member of the species should be able
to indulge in, and which not? This is finally a primitive issue as well
as a politically profound one. When our ancestral hunter-gatherer bands
met to decide what to do next, anyone's opinion might turn out to be valuable.
Freedom of speech is efficient.
6) A behavioral vitamin is the opportunity to reproduce. Obviously some
political regimes have sought to curtail this with varying degrees of success
and human cost. Inasmuch as this may involve efforts to affect the sexual
behavior necessary for reproduction, then it is a very broad matter indeed,
one very popular among people with opinions. There are also subtler or at
least less draconian means of affecting reproductive freedoms - for example
those anti-natal ideologies at the core of much modern feminism which in
effect induced countless women to miscalculate the nature of human reproductive
nature. Both Sylvia Hewlett and Midge Decter have recently written about
what in retrospect will come to see rather like the unnecessary sacrifices
to the Stalinist line by those who fell for it in this country to say nothing
of the USSR and elsewhere.
7) Related to this is a vitamin young children need, which is the opportunity
for durable and predictable connection to their parents - at least their
mothers. In our study of the Israeli kibbutz movement, WOMEN IN THE KIBBUTZ
Joseph Shepher and I described how it was the mothers and their mothers
in the communities who overwhelmingly voted to disband the children's houses
in which their kids were supposed to live from six weeks on. The men always
supported the children's houses which were ideologically better and cheaper.
But the children and mothers clearly made their needs and preferences felt.
We are entitled to ask if recent changes in the welfare system requiring
women with children to earn money, very often by raising the children of
other women in a similar pickle, is the desirable solution to a core mammalian
issue - how to protect mothers and babies from the ruckus of the wider system.
Let us recall before Christmas that that issue is at the mammalian core
of the Christmas story, which is the centerpiece of the most popular celebration
in the world. And meanwhile expensively and elegantly trained women turn
over their children to unlettered nannies from countries they've never been
to and with whom they would not abide a fifteen minutes coffee break at
the diner.
8) Let me break into a cloud of big trouble by suggesting that a chronic
vitamin factor in human arrangements is the opportunity for gender-specific
behavior. This simply means that on balance there is good reason to expect
that in various venues and for various reasons males and females will act
differently and in others of course they will act the same. The human nature
project makes clear that sex differences are not necessarily the result
of conspiracy, patriarchal oppression, formal inequity, and the like. They
may be and have certainly been in countless ways and are still in a widespread
distribution. However as we look ahead it would do well to expect the emergence
of sex difference in any complex ongoing social group and be surprised if
there weren't any and wondering why not.
9) Finally a vitamin which energizes a community when it exists and depresses
it when it does not is the awareness of communal protection. Whatever authority
exists has to provide the citizenry protection from internal criminality
and more significantly and dramatically from the threats of warfare. Governments
such as the North Korean clearly fail to generate any sense of fairness
and safety among its population and depression and widespread alcoholism
appear to be one clear result, to say nothing of the refugees who at great
risk vote with their feet.
Here the human nature project suddenly expands into a large amphitheater
potentially housing a chorus or cacophony of the voices traditionally heard
on issues of good government, fair government, peaceful government, and
the like. But if we abide by Aristotle's "by nature" description, even if
the issue is huge we are nevertheless not exempt from approaching it with
the same candor and even confidence as when we consider ideal playgrounds
for children.
Where does this fit in the larger currents of contemporary social policy?
Clearly there are no easy answers to the myriad problems posed by the industrial
system and the complex vastly rambunctious stimuli it demands an upper paleolithic
former hunter-gatherer to attend to. But there's a model, which has served
quite well. During its early splurges and then during the effective triumph
of the industrial way of life over all others, there was a reasonable assumption
which appeared to work that the environment was somehow self-correcting
and able to absorb whatever was given to it.
Then a mild-mannered marine biologist named Rachel Carson wrote THE SEA
AROUND US. This revealed that even the vast changing surging oceans were
being polluted by the results of our new lives. The environmental movement
began and it became clear that the hugeness of water and the hugeness of
our air could not themselves repair what we produced. We were too clamorous
and they were too frail, too equipoised for an immensely ancient non-industrial
world.
Clearly there have been excesses - if insufficient successes too - to that
environmental movement and too much baggage tied to the train. Nevertheless
it's become clearly necessary and has become in a way also a conservative
factor in seriously defining our lives as well as an easy cause for youngsters
wearing bandanas.
My proposal here is both metaphorical and real, which is that we need now
an inner environmental movement, about our nature in here, just as we have
stretched and learned to comprehend the nature out there. The nature in
here is obviously more mysterious, more personal, more intricately connected
to foggy fears and orchestral dreams. An Irish poet once announced "To the
Blind, everything is sudden." But we know now about our history and more
interestingly and complexly our prehistorical story, which is in fact told
in our genes. Therefore it seems plain we should not and need not be blind
about the forces which permitted us to perdure and prosper and which remain
part of human Aristotelian nature. |