The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: “Which… shall we choose?… Let us take this stand…. We can do otherwise.” And he too cites Marx’s “wonderful aphorism” about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will:
Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as “free will.”24
Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym ‘volition” (with or without “elements of difference,” whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious “evolution of consciousness.” Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.
The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists’ world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to “bourgeois” democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses “bourgeois” as an epithet.) If the “we” is truly unfettered by biology, then once “we” see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the “we” is an imperfect product of evolution—limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority—then “we” had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which “we” are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect humans.
THE GHOST IN the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left. In his book The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature, the psychologist Morton Hunt has shown that the foes include people on the left, people on the right, and a motley collection of single-issue fanatics in between.25 So far I have discussed the far-left outrage because it has been deployed in the battlefield of ideas in the universities and the mainstream press. Those on the far right have also been outraged, though until recently they have aimed at different targets and have fought in different arenas.
The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain.
The religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears. Most obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one creationist minister put it, “If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation?”26
But the opposition to evolution goes beyond a desire to defend biblical literalism. Modern religious people may not believe in the literal truth of every miracle narrated in the Bible, but they do believe that humans were designed in God’s image and placed on earth for a larger purpose—namely, to live a moral life by following God’s commandments. If humans are accidental products of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, morality would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals/So let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.”27 After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as “our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.”28
The most damaging effect of the right-wing opposition to evolution is the corruption of American science education by activists in the creationist movement. Until a Supreme Court decision in 1968, states were allowed to ban the teaching of evolution outright. Since then, creationists have tried to hobble it in ways that they hope will pass constitutional muster. These include removing evolution from science proficiency standards, demanding disclaimers that it is “only a theory,” watering down the curriculum, and opposing textbooks with good coverage of evolution or imposing ones with coverage of creationism. In recent years the National Center for Science Education has learned of new instances of these tactics at a rate of about one a week, coming from forty states.29
The religious right is discomfited not just by evolution but by neuro-science. By exorcising the ghost in the machine, brain science is undermining two moral doctrines that depend on it. One is that every person has a soul, which finds value, exercises free will, and is responsible for its choices. If behavior is controlled instead by circuits in the brain that follow the laws of chemistry, choice and value would be myths and the possibility of moral responsibility would evaporate. As the creationist advocate John West put it, “If human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life—religion, morality, beauty—is revealed to be without objective basis.”30
The other moral doctrine (which is found in some, but not all, Christian denominations) is that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at death, thereby defining who is a person with a right to life. The doctrine makes abortion, euthanasia, and the harvesting of stem cells from blastocysts equivalent to murder. It makes humans fundamentally different from animals. And it makes human cloning a violation of the divine order. All this would seem to be threatened by neuroscientists, who say that the self or the soul inheres in neural activity that develops gradually in the brain of an embryo, that can be seen in the brains of animals, and that can break down piecemeal with aging and disease. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 13.)
But the right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature can no longer be associated only with Bible-thumpers and televangelists. Today evolution is being challenged by some of the most cerebral theorists in the formerly secular neoconservative movement. They are embracing a hypothesis called Intelligent Design, originated by the biochemist Michael Behe.31 The molecular machinery of cells cannot function in a simpler form, Behe argues, and therefore it could not have evolved piecemeal by natural selection. Instead it must have been conceived as a working invention by an intelligent designer. The designer could, in theory, have been an advanced alien from outer space, but everyone knows that the subtext of the theory is that it must have been God.
Biologists reject Behe’s argument for a number of reasons.32 His specific claims about the “irreducible complexity” of biochemistry are unproven or just wrong. He takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out and chalks it up to design by default. When it comes to the intelligent designer, Behe suddenly jettisons all scientific scruples and does not question where the designer came from or how the designer works. And he ignores the overwhelming evidence that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel.
Nonetheless, Intelligent Design has been embraced by leading neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Other conservative intellectuals have
also sympathized with creationism for moral reasons, such as the law professor Philip Johnson, the writer William F. Buckley, the columnist Tom Bethell, and, disconcertingly, the bioethicist Leon Kass—chair of George W. Bush’s new Council on Bioethics and thus a shaper of the nation’s policies on biology and medicine.33 A story entitled “The Deniable Darwin” appeared, astonishingly, on the cover of Commentary, which means that a magazine that was once a leading forum for secular Jewish intellectuals is now more skeptical of evolution than is the Pope!34
It is not clear whether these worldly thinkers are really convinced that Darwinism is false or whether they think it is important for other people to believe it is false. In a scene from Inherit the Wind, the play about the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor and defense attorney (based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow) are relaxing together after a day in court. The prosecutor says of the Tennessee locals:
They’re simple people, Henry; poor people. They work hard and they need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to take it away from them? It’s all they have.
That is not far from the attitude of the neocons. Kristol has written:
If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded—or even if it suspects—that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe.35
He spells out the moral corollary:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.36
As the science writer Ronald Bailey observes, “Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is ‘the opium of the people’; they add a heartfelt, ‘Thank God!’”37
Many conservative intellectuals join fundamentalist Christians in deploring neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which they see as explaining away the soul, eternal values, and free choice. Kass writes:
With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic possession (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite) but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypeptide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment.38
Similarly, the journalist Andrew Ferguson warns his readers that evolutionary psychology “is sure to give you the creeps,” because “whether behavior is moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science, and materialism in general, cannot make.”39 The new sciences, he writes, claim that people are nothing but “meat puppets,” a frightening shift from the traditional Judeo-Christian view in which “human beings [are] persons from the start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious.”40
Even the left-baiting author Tom Wolfe, who admires neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, worries about their moral implications. In his essay “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” he writes that when science has finally killed the soul (“that last refuge of values”), “the lurid carnival that will ensue may make [Nietzsche’s] phrase ‘the total eclipse of all values’ seem tame”:
Meanwhile, the notion of a self—a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior—a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds—this old-fashioned notion (what’s a bootstrap, for God’s sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away… slipping away…41
“Where does that leave self-control?” he asks. “Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for all?”42
An irony in the modern denial of human nature is that partisans at opposite extremes of the political spectrum, who ordinarily can’t stand the sight of each other, find themselves strange bedfellows. Recall how the signatories of “Against ‘Sociobiology’” wrote that theories like Wilson’s “provided an important basis for… the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” In May 2001 the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives resolved that “Adolf Hitler and others have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced… to justify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals.”43 The sponsor of the resolution (which was eventually defeated) cited in its defense a passage by Gould, which is not the first time that he has been cited approvingly in creationist propaganda.44 Though Gould has been a tireless opponent of creationism, he has been an equally tireless opponent of the idea that evolution can explain mind and morality, and that is the implication of Darwinism that creationists fear most.
The left and the right also agree that the new sciences of human nature threaten the concept of moral responsibility. When Wilson suggested that in humans, as in many other mammals, males have a greater desire for multiple sexual partners than do females, Rose accused him of really saying:
Don’t blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies, it’s not their fault they are genetically programmed.45
Compare Tom Wolfe, tongue only partly in cheek:
The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i.e., unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it!)46
On one wing we have Gould asking the rhetorical question:
Why do we want to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism upon our genes?47
And on the other wing we find Ferguson raising the same point:
The “scientific belief” would… appear to be corrosive of any notion of free will, personal responsibility, or universal morality.48
For Rose and Gould the ghost in the machine is a “we” that can construct history and change the world at will. For Kass, Wolfe, and Ferguson it is a “soul” that makes moral judgments according to religious precepts. But all of them see genetics, neuroscience, and evolution as threats to this irreducible locus of free choice.
WHERE DOES THIS leave intellectual life today? The hostility to the sciences of human nature from the religious right is likely to increase, but the influence of the right will be felt more in direct appeals to politicians than from changes in the intellectual climate. Any inroads of the religious right into mainstream intellectual life will be limited by their opposition to the theory of evolution itself. Whether it is known as creationism or by the euphemism Intelligent Design, a denial of the theory of natural selection will founder under the weight of the mass of evidence that the theory is correct. How much additional damage the denial will do to science education and biomedical research before it sinks is unknown.
The hostility from the radical left, on the other hand, has left a substantial mark on modern intellectual life, because the so-called radical scientists are now the establishment. I have met many social and cognitive scientists who proudly say they have learned all their biology from Gould and Lewontin.49 Many intellectuals defer to Lewontin as the infallible pontiff of evolution and genetics, and many philosophers of biology spent time as his apprentice. A sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or genetics has become a fixture of British journalism. As for Gould, Isaac Asimov probably did not intend the irony when he wrote in a book blurb that “Gould can do no wrong,” but that is prec
isely the attitude of many journalists and social scientists. A recent article in New York magazine on the journalist Robert Wright called him a “stalker” and a “young punk” with “penis envy” because he had the temerity to criticize Gould on his logic and facts.50
In part the respect awarded to the radical scientists has been earned. Quite aside from their scientific accomplishments, Lewontin is an incisive analyst on many scientific and social issues, Gould has written hundreds of superb essays on natural history, and Rose wrote a fine book on the neuroscience of memory. But they have also positioned themselves shrewdly on the intellectual landscape. As the biologist John Alcock explains, “Stephen Jay Gould abhors violence, he speaks out against sexism, he despises Nazis, he finds genocide horrific, he is unfailingly on the side of the angels. Who can argue with such a person?”51 This immunity from argument allowed the radical scientists’ unfair attacks on others to become part of the conventional wisdom.
Many writers today casually equate behavioral genetics with eugenics, as if studying the genetic correlates of behavior were the same as coercing people in their decisions about having children. Many equate evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism, as if studying our evolutionary roots were the same as justifying the station of the poor. The confusions do not come only from the scientifically illiterate but may be found in prestigious publications such as Scientific American and Science.52 After Wilson argued in Consilience that divisions between fields of human knowledge were becoming obsolete, the historian Tzvetan Todorov wrote sarcastically, “I have a proposal for Wilson’s next book… [an] analysis of Social Darwinism, the doctrine that was adopted by Hitler, and of the ways it differs from sociobiology.”53 When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2001, its leaders made a ritual denunciation of “genetic determinism,” the belief—held by no one—that “all characteristics of the person are ‘hard-wired’ into our genome.”54