>
>Some "liberal" wisdom-literature on sociobiology. Although I don't
>_completely_ disagree with this, it's irritating enough.
It is a bit irritating, and I rather like Konner, whose The Tangled Wing is really a model of thoughtful and restrained popularization of sociobiology--I recommend it. It's out in a new edition I haven't read.
I included just
>enough of the author's paean to Jefferson and Madison and the US
>constitution
>to give the flavor. How wise the great fathers were about human nature!
Well, I'm more or less the house "right winger," as a liberal democrat and defender of constitutional democracy, but is it really out of place to say that the framers, and in particular Madison, really was very wise and acute about politics (that is, about human nature). I actually hold less of a brief for Jefferson (who was not a framer), despite his being, on paper, somewhat more "progressive," but the Federalist Papers are a profound meditation on politics whose lessons anyone interested in the design of a new social order--which is what Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were doing--had better absorb thoroughly, in both its successes and failures. One needn't share M2Js bias towards the protection of property to appecriate their acuity about how politics works.
How
>marvelous that their deep and timeless insights should now be ratified by
>modern science!
Well, if their insights were not ratofied by science, they wouldn't be so good, eh?
When people of this sort start quoting the Federalist Papers
>and Isaiah Berlin, in my mind's ear I begin to hear "Pomp and Circumstance"
I agree with you about Sir Isaiah, a great scholar of intellectual history and a sententious windbag when it came to politics. However, his Two Concepts of Liberty, although sojmewhat confused in execution, is genuinely deep and brilliant.
Konner says:
>
>Because this approach often suggests biological explanations of gender
>roles,
>it affronts many feminists.
Typically careful: "many" feminists (quite true) are social constructionists. Not all, as K recognizes.
>The
>scientific critics have included highly respected figures in biology: Ruth
>Hubbard, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Jonathan Beckwith, among
>others. . . . Nonetheless, they immediately
>perceived a grave threat to liberal values, and their opposition has
>persisted ever since.
>
Lewontin is of course a revolutionary Marxist. But K is writing for the American Propsect.
>However respected the source, the criticism from this group has had little
>effect on the direction of scientific research: sociobiology is now firmly
>established as an accepted branch of normal science.
Hm. I don't know if this is true. Animal S-B is of course a real science, and some ots exponents, like Wilson, are first rate scientists. But human S-B?
>If liberals are to understand why this has happened, they need to consider
>the possibility that Gould, Lewontin, and other prominent scientific
>critics
>were wrong in their attack on sociobiology in the first place.
K seems to miss the point here that G, L, and philosophers like Phil Kitcher object not to the biological study of huiman nature but to the misuse of biology to justify the existing order.
To be sure, some conservative intellectuals infer from
>sociobiology that liberal reforms are doomed by human nature. But
>sociobiology today is not nineteenth-century social Darwinism reborn.
But there's a lot of that, isn't there? Konner (a liberal) is trying to dissociate his project from that of the Robert Ardreys (anyone remember him?), David Barashes and the like.
As I
>intend to show, there is no conflict between liberal political philosophy
>and
>sociobiology. Indeed, quite the contrary is true.
This is probably right.
>With a completed Das Kapital in hand, Karl Marx wrote to Charles Darwin,
>requesting permission to dedicate it to the older, world-famous biologist.
A myth, though Marx liked Origins, commentiong, however, on Darwin's crude English manner of exposition. Marx always meant to dedicate Capital to Wolff.
>Darwin's demurral showed that he was a bourgeois, conservative sort of
>scientific revolutionary
That is true of Darwin, but Marx never said it.
>Marx, of course, was a kind of group selectionist; classes were
>relentlessly
>pitted in dialectical conflict. This has proved wrong, partly because of
>defection (opportunity?) and partly because of the enlightened
>self-interest
>of ruling classes, choosing conciliation over chaos.
Just as we see all around us, This is genuinely irritating. Wat does he think this is, 1963?
The utopian part of
>Marx—his version of the Hegelian end of history—was even less
>compatible
>with real evolutionary theory, since like all utopian visions it was
>perfectly cooperative and free of selfishness.
And where does Konner get this? First of all, Marx talked about the beginning of history and the end of prehistory. Second, he didn't say enough about communism to allow this inference. Thirdly, nothing in his idea that communism involves the end of class conflict and political oppression requires the assumption that that means the end of all conflict. And "all" utopias involve perfect cooperation? That's just dumb.
>A 1789 monograph from the laboratory of Madison et al. (the one that begins
>"We the people . . .")
This is too cute.
described what might be viewed as an epochal social
>science discovery. It presented the plan for an intricate, elegant device,
>a
>sociological invention for keeping human nature in check, while allowing
>the
>conflict that seethes in the human breast to leak out through various
>safety
>valves. In fact, you could say that they harnessed conflict itself to make
>the machine run. For unlike most machines, this device was to be built out
>of
>people; therefore, its designers had to have some notion of what these
>human
>building units were.
He's right about what a constitutional order has to involve. That doesn't mean human nature is eternally fixed, just that a sdocial ordere has to respect whatever it is in the circumstances.
jks
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