Maslow, Ardrey and Lorenz: The Narrative as Science

Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community just penned an article entitled, “What Abraham Maslow got Wrong about the Limits of Science and Psychological Knowledge.”  Quoting from the article,

Maslow was influential because he was very smart, wrote well, and had many good ideas. But he was also influential because his theory told many of the cultural elites of the era that they were objectively more mentally healthy and more psychologically developed than were their opponents. Flattering poppycock, and also dangerously undemocratic.

…Maslow wanted to give an objective validation that, for example, the Viet Nam war protestor was objectively superior to the Viet Nam general, the environmentalist was objectively superior to the captain of industry etc. Many cultural elites ate it up, just as Soviet elites ate it up when their psychiatrists said that anyone who didn’t love the government was mentally ill and needed electroshock treatment post-haste.

Psychologists and social scientists generally still venture repeatedly today into the territory of human values and attempt to claim the ability to make objective judgments about which are the most healthy or scientifically validated. They don’t ever seem to learn that they are often just trying to rationalize cultural fashions.

Like Freud, Maslow was a proponent of unfalsifiable hypotheses, or at least they were unfalsifiable in his day.  However one cares to characterize their theories, they weren’t science.  They might better be described as dogmas suited for true believers.  That said, it seems to me the “elite” thing has been overused of late.  “Elite” is a pejorative term, and conveys very little meaning in the sense used here.  In what sense, for example, were Vietnam war protestors “elites” and Vietnam generals “not elites.”  It would be more accurate to say that Maslow validated an ideological narrative, not the status of an elite.  Those who identified themselves with the narrative described came from all walks of life, and many of them by no means belonged to any elites. 

That hardly exculpates the psychologists.  Peddlers of narratives are no more “scientists” than flatterers of elites.  They tend to be recognizable because they always tip their hand when anyone challenges their orthodoxies.  For example, back in the heyday of Maslow the tribe of psychologists also included many behaviorist believers in milder or stronger variations of the “blank slate.” They were contradicted by thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, who insisted on a) the significance of innate predispositions, or “human nature” on our behavior and b) the fact that this human nature did not always prompt us to do “nice” and “kind” things. There was a large corpus of repeatable experiments available to confirm these hypotheses, even in their day, and Ardrey, in particular, did a brilliant job of drawing attention to them.   Establishment psychologists and professionals in related fields reacted, not with reasoned arguments, but with attempts to ridicule and vilify them.  For example, anthropologist Ashley Montagu, one of the foremost among them wrote,

…for man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings. …the fact is, that with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless.

The field studies of Schaller on the gorilla, of Goodall on the chimpanzee, of Harrisson on the orang-utan, as well as those of others, show these creatures to be anything but irascible. All the field observers agree that these creatures are amiable and quite unaggressive.

Human nature is what man learns to become a human being.

Such books are both congenial to the temper of the times and comforting to the reader who is seeking some sort of absolution for his sins. It is gratifying to find father confessors who will relieve one of the burdensome load of guilt we bear by shifting the responsibility for it to our “natural inheritance,” our “innate aggressiveness.”

Similarly, from anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer,

(Ardrey’s) categories and preferences are bound to give comfort and provide ammunition for the radical Right, for the Birchites and Empire Loyalists and their analogues everywhere.

from social scientist Kenneth Boulding,

A line of argument like that of Ardrey’s, therefore, seems to legitimate our present morality, in regarding the threat system as dominant at all costs, by reference to our biological ancestors. If the names of both antiquity and of science can be drawn upon to legitimate our behavior, the moral uneasiness about napalm and the massacre of the innocent in Vietnam may be assuaged.

from anthropologist Ralph Holloway,

In short, this (Ardrey’s) book is an apology and rationalization for Imperialism, Pax Americana, Laissez Faire, Social Darwinism, and that greatest of all evolutionary developments, Capitalism.

and so on, from those who had elevated collaboration with Pol Pot to the noblest of virtues.  Since those days, the synod of psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have been forced by accumulating mountains of evidence to accept “a”. They have never forgiven Ardrey for being right, and he is now an unperson among them. They still manage to studiously ignore “b”, but here, too, real science, not to mention our 5000 year history of constant warfare and mayhem, is catching up to them. The problem is not confirmation bias among elites, but confirmation bias among ideologues, and, in particular, the true believers in the secular religion that’s now the fashion on the “progressive left.”  They are just as busy today trying to transmute the lead of “is” to the gold of “ought” as they were in the days of Maslow.