On the Risk of Believing Things that aren’t True

The rulers of Iran continue to poke sticks into the Iraeli hornet’s nest.  Of course, religious zealots, both secular and “spiritual” have done this since time immemorial, whenever they’ve gained enough power to make themselves a nuisance.  Every religion implies an outgroup.  For the Communist secular religion, the outgroup was the “bourgeoisie.”  In Cambodia, they murdered 2 million out of a population of 7 million in order to destroy the “bourgeoisie,” beheading the country in the process.  Spiritual religions tend to be longer lived than the secular variety because it’s impossible to fact check them until after you’re dead.  As a result the specific outgroups they focus on as “enemies of God” tend to vary somewhat over the centuries.  The fashion among the Christians, for example, has gone from murdering Jews to slaughtering heretics to burning witches and back again over the years.  The more “imperialist” Moslems have always focused more on seizing the territories of “infidels,” and continue to do so in the case of Israel.

This habit of attacking outgroups in order to please some non-existent supernatural being, to promote some fantastic “forces of history,” to acquire “Lebensraum” for some nonexistent race, or whatever, is becoming increasingly risky.  The risk is becoming particularly acute at the moment in the case of Iran.  The Jews, always an attractive outgroup because they have typically been both different and weak, have just experienced the result of “passive resistance” against a powerful enemy who wants to kill you.  I suspect that they’re not inclined to try it twice, and this time they’re armed with nuclear weapons.   The theocratic rulers of Iran, who “sigh for the prophet’s paradise to come,” and confidently expect their reward in the next world, are, of course, indifferent to the threat.  The citizens of Iran who are less sanguine about the existence of a next world, or who suspect that the one awaiting their rulers might turn out to be more tropical than they expect, would do well to either emigrate or start digging.

The Other Side of Morality

There are inevitably two sides to human morality.  One side applies to the ingroup and one to the outgroup.  The choice of one implies the other.  Evil comes with every good.  That is our nature, and we cannot change our nature by merely modifying education, culture, experience, or “nurture,” if you will.  It is the reason that we should finally refrain from projecting new “universally valid” moral systems, and begin dismantling the old ones, at least to the extent that we value life and liberty.

George Orwell left an anecdote that nicely illustrates the above in one of his journals.  It was written in 1936 while he was collecting experiences he would later describe in his novel, The Road to Wigan Pier.  In this case, the “universally valid” moral system in question was Communism, which was a great deal more plausible to the intellectuals of the day as a path to “human flourishing” than it is now.  Orwell had just met a true believer in the future worker’s paradise, and describes him as follows:

…Is terribly embittered and declares that feeling of actual hatred for the bourgeoisie, even personal hatred of individuals, is necessary to any genuine Socialist…  But he is a tiresome person to be with, being definitely disgruntled and too conscious of his Communist convictions.  In Rotherham we had to have lunch at a slightly expensive restaurant because there didn’t seem to be any others except pubs, and when in there he was sweating and groaning about the “bourgeois atmosphere” and saying he could not eat this kind of food.

This hatred of the outgroup and the feeling of physical defilement induced by contact with it or, as in this case, with its food, should be familiar to anyone who’s taken the time to read one of the many books about morality and human nature that have been published recently.  It is a hatred that, when systematized into the “scientific” philosophy of Communism, resulted in the deaths of 100 million people.  Other moral systems have had other outgroups, but the result has always been the same.  The Christians hated and butchered heretics and witches.  The Moslems hated and butchered infidels.  The Nazis hated and butchered Jews.  So it has always been, through countless centuries of senseless warfare and brutality, and so it will continue into the future, until we finally realize that it is unreasonable to expect that behavioral traits that promoted the survival of small groups of primitive hunter gatherers will continue to promote our survival in a radically different world.

On the Legitimacy of Secular Morality

Occasionally religious moralists, and especially those of a fundamentalist bent, can be more logical than their secular counterparts.  The basis for the legitimacy of their moral systems is, of course, God.  Things are Good, or not, because God wants it that way.  Remove God and that ultimate sanction disappears.  As they have never been diffident about pointing out, without a God secular moral systems are left floating in air with no visible means of support.  The same logical and seemingly obvious conclusion has occurred to many outstanding thinkers in the past.  They have included, for example, our own Benjamin Franklin, who alludes to it in his autobiography as a reason for promoting religious faith among the masses, lest they turn to evil for the lack of any reason to prefer the good.

Secular moralists typically counter such arguments by pointing out that their own moral systems promote the Good because it can be demonstrated that, if only everyone would act according as prescribed by these systems, some attractive goal, such as “human flourishing,” will be achieved.  The problem with such arguments is that there is no essential connection whatsoever between the Good and whatever more or less attractive ideals or goals these people happen to be promoting.  To credit them at all, it is necessary to simply ignore the evidence, increasingly weighty and compelling in light of recent research, that human moral behavior and perception of good and evil are the expression of evolved behavioral traits.  If human morality is an expression of something evolved, then, like every other evolved trait, it exists because it happened to promote the survival and reproductive success of individual packets of genes.  As such, it did not come into existence to serve any conscious purpose or goal.  The attempt to connect it with such goals or purposes after the fact must inevitably be arbitrary and illogical, regardless of how many people happen to agree that those particular goals or purposes are attractive.  It is also extremely dangerous, because human nature, of which human morality is a part, will stubbornly and persistently remain what it is, regardless of what we might happen to want it to be.

Why dangerous?  Because no Good comes without its complementary Evil.  Good Christians come with evil heretics and witches, good Moslems come with evil infidels, good proletarians come with evil bourgeoisie, and good Nazis come with evil Jews.  For every ingroup there is an outgroup, and persecution of the outgroup has ever been as characteristic of every new moral system as promotion of the ingroup.  Do you really believe the promoters of the latest secular moral systems have no outgroups?  Just read their books!  The more self-righteous these people are, the more they wear their hatreds and animosities on their sleeves.

I suggest that we finally recognize morality for what it really is and climb off this treadmill once and for all.  I suggest it, not because I want to establish yet another new moral system, but because I would prefer not to suffer the potential inconvenience of dealing with people who are trying to kill me because I’ve been unfortunate enough to land in their outgroup.

Antediluvian Anti-Americanism

Habitués of the European media are aware of the anti-American slant commonly found in “news” stories about the US, unless, of course, they happen to belong to that rather common species, the anti-American Americans. In fact, there was recently something of an “algal bloom” of anti-Americanism there, lasting more or less from the last years of the Clinton into the first years of the Bush Administration before it finally choked on its own excess. The tone is rather more subdued today, although one still sees the occasional piece of red meat thrown out to the proles. It’s good for the bottom line.

The phenomenon is hardly a novelty. As I noted in a recent post about George Orwell, he often referred to instances of it in his essays, stretching over a period from the early 20′s to the late 40′s, and unabated even during some of the darkest days of World War II when, by all accounts, we were supposedly allies. It actually goes back much further than that. In fact, I recently found some amusing examples in a copy of the British Quarterly Review, the great organ of the Tories in the first half of the nineteenth century, dating back to April, 1822. There, in a review of several books about our country that had recently made their appearance entitled, “Views, Visits, and Tours in North America,” we find ourselves described as a vulgar and inconsiderable tribe engaged mainly in the mutual gouging out of eyes and taking of potshots at each other. For example, one of the authors recounts several anecdotes about the “rough tumblers” he ran into in Pennsylvania:

…he was told of another who had been so milled in a rough and tumble, that a compassionate bystander said to him, ‘you have come badly off this time, I guess.’ ‘Have I,” replied the fellow with a triumphant grin, ‘what do you think of this?’ holding up an eye which he had just taken out of his pocket.’

Potential emigrants are advised to avoid the “pestilential vapors that hover over the thick savannas of the American wilds.” By way of example, one of the books describes a party of disappointed pilgrims, on their way back from the new state of Illinois:

These poor people informed him that they had purchased a large tract of land in the state of Illinois, and settled upon it the preceding summer, since which period they had lost eight of their number by dysentery, fever and ague; and the remainder had determined to quite the pruchase, and return with the loss of all their time and nearly all their money.

I trust that at least a few of the brave souls who risked their fortunes in Illinois had better luck. The author of another of the books recounts a similar tale of woe:

In addition to the misery of travelling in an old carriage, ‘with springs of hickory-wood, and horses fitter for the currier than for harness,’ he meets with rattle-snakes, and alligators, and dead carcasses, and putrid smells; butcher’s meat not fit for any creature but a dog; cows that give only a quart of milk a day, and, worst of all, with dreadful agues and fevers which carry off a great part of the population.

In summing up the tale of all these torments and miseries, the reviewer reflects sadly on the folly of those who would leave their happy home,

…to replunge into that state of savage life from which we happily escaped so many centuries ago; – to forego all the comforts and all the blessings of civilization; to be set down for life in the midst of a lonely and pestilential wilderness, surrounded with disease and death; – to be devoured by fleas and bugs, and mosquitoes within doors, and to live in the constant dread of snakes, scorpions, and scolopendras without…

etc., etc. I rather suspect that some of the British coal miners in the Manchester of that day had a rather less charitable view of “all the comforts and all the blessings of civilization” to be found in the England of the time. But as for us poor Americans, alas, we had not even the solace of a respectable religion in these miserable surroundings. One of the authors describes a “representative congregation” of our countrymen as,

…an ignorant, vulgar and fanatical horde, who, under the name of Shakers, have established themselves at a town named Union, not far from Cincinnati. This sect originated with a woman of the name of Ann Lee, of Manchester, who having, with her associates, committed various offences against public decorum, was glad to take refuge in America. The essentials of the creed are nearly allied to blasphemy; and the admission to the holy state of matrimony is so opposite to any thing like decency, that none but the filthiest pen could prostitute itself in detailing it.

In fine, then, the reviewer can foretell no great future for our country;

…in vain should we look for the arts, the elegances, the refinements, and general intelligence of this country (England) among so heterogeneous a population as that of the United States, where, with the exception of a few cities and towns on the shores of the Atlantic, the inhabitants of which are mostly engaged in trade, a great part of the population is perpetually on the wing, confined to no fixed home, and changing their occupations with their places of abode. Among a people thus circumstanced, the refinements of intellectual and polished society are not to be found or expected; and whether they ever will exist under the present form of government is a point on which our opinion is not called for; …but we have very little hesitation in repeating a conviction we have long felt, that as population becomes more dense in the Western States the present republican form of government will be found inadequate, and that Old and New America will necessarily become at least two, if not more, distinct and rival nations; the result of which would, in all probablility, be advantageous to both or all of them.

Thus the wishful thinking of an old English Tory. I should say we did rather better than he expected. Readers of this blog will recognize European anti-Americanism, both antediluvian and modern, as a sadly predictable manifestation of what Robert Ardrey referred to as the Amity/Enmity Complex, that aspect of human nature that we so love to ignore in spite of the mayhem, slaughter and warfare that have played such a constant and pervasive role in human history and of which it has been the prime mover. One can but speculate on why we Americans have never been so quick to identify the Europeans as an outgroup and return all this spite and hatred in kind. We certainly have had no lack of hatreds and animosities of our own in the meantime. Perhaps we can just be more easily imagined as a single, distinct entity upon which to foist all the stigmata of evil.

Whatever the target, though, it is in our nature to perceive an outgroup for every ingroup, and an evil for every good. As the horrific events of the twentieth century amply demonstrated, that tendency of ours is becoming a greater existential threat to our species with every advance in the technology of destruction. We would do well to stop ignoring it and at least try to find ways to minimize its destructiveness. Our survival may depend on it.

The Forgettable Philosophy of Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz was a great man.  A careful observer of animal behavior, he noted the many similarities between the innate traits of some of the species he studied and the behavior of human beings.  In view of the fact that we are the products of a similar process of evolution, and the improbability of the supposition that our ancestors had suddenly shed all these innate traits in the relatively short time it took them to evolve large brains, he came to the seemingly obvious conclusion that the ultimate cause of these analogous characteristics was to be found in the genetic programming of the brain.  It was not, however, obvious to a great number of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and other professional ”experts” in human behavior, including the vast majority of them in the United States, over a period of many decades.  They persisted stubbornly in the belief that no such innate traits existed, that all human behavior worth mentioning was a result of culture and education, and that the human mind at birth was actually a “blank slate.”

The absurdities of blank slate orthodoxy are sufficiently obvious that the ease of debunking them is akin to that of shooting fish in a barrel.  In fact, there were numerous debunkers during the decade of the 60′s and early 70′s when the theory was still in vogue.  Of these, Lorenz was the second most effective.  The most effective was Robert Ardrey.  As proof of this assertion, we have the testimony of the blank slaters themselves, conveniently assembled in an invaluable little book published in 1968 and edited by Ashley Montagu entitled, Man and Aggression.

In the fullness of time, blank slate orthodoxy collapsed under its own weight and the pressure of advances in the relevant sciences.  It is one of the more remarkable oddities of this field of study that has always had such an abundance of oddities that its demise was accompanied by the emergence of a whole new orthodoxy in the form of a fantastically imaginary account of its downfall.  The whole, fanciful tale can be found in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, purportedly a “history” of the blank slate in which he manages to get through 528 pages in paperback with hardly a mention of its two most effective opponents.  Lorenz is dismissed because of his “hydraulic theory,” an hypothesis that made only a minor appearance in his work and was utterly insignificant as far as his fundamental thought on human behavior is concerned.  Ardrey, a brilliant man and the greatest debunker of them all, is waved out of existence with a single mention because, according to Richard Dawkins, no less, he was “completely and utterly wrong.”  This concoction was apparently produced to cover the shame of the academic and professional experts in human behavior who had been so wrong for so long, in part by trotting out E.O. Wilson as the “real” father of opposition to the blank slate.  His book, On Human Nature, was merely a repetition of the fundamental conclusions that had appeared in the work of Lorenz and Ardrey more than a decade earlier.  No matter.  He could plausibly be claimed by the experts as one of their own.  Now, instead of being shamed by a mere playwright, they had actually cleaned their own house.  To add oddity to oddity, it turns out that the reason that Dawkins claimed that Ardrey was “totally and utterly wrong,” was his support for the theory of group selection in his book, The Social Contract.  The theory, still highly controversial, was subsequently embraced by none other than E.O. Wilson!  And what of Lorenz?  He may have been right about innate behavior, but, regrettably, he had linked it with some of the less savory human traits in On Aggression.  For example, from that book,

To the humble seeker of biological truth there cannot be the slightest doubt that human militant enthusiasm evolved out of a communal defense response of our prehuman ancestors.  The unthinking single-mindedness of the response must have been of high survival value even in a tribe of fully evolved human beings.  It was necessary for the individual male to forget all his otgher allegiances in order to be able to dedicate himself, body and soul, to the cause of the communal battle.

and,

Humanity is not enthusiastically combative because it is split into political parties, but it is divided into opposing camps because this is the adequate stimulus situation to arouse militant enthusiasm in a satisfying manner.  “If ever a doctrine of universal salvation should gain ascendancy over the whole earth to the exclusion of all others,” writes Erich von Holst, “it would at once divide into two strongly opposing factions (one’s own true one and the other heretical one) and hostility and war would thrive as before, mankind being – unfortunately – what it is!”

This was a bit much for the orthodox “experts.”  After all, they had been assuring each other for years that the pervasiveness of warfare in virtually all human societies since the beginning of recorded time was merely a regrettable coincidence.  Take away war toys, adjust the “culture” here and there, and fine tune the educational system a bit and, viola!, it would be banished to mankind’s dark past, never to return again.  If something in our genes actually did contribute to this remarkable “coincidence” of warfare, such dreams vanished like the morning fog, and with them all the Brave New Worlds of “human flourishing” that were being planned for a recalcitrant humanity.  Having strained on the gnat of innate behavior, they found this added lump of “aggression” just too much to swallow.  Lorenz had to go.

No matter, in the end, Pinker’s fairy tale doesn’t wash in any case.  The truth will out.  We have Ashley Montagu and his fellow blank slaters to thank for that.  Pinker may have relegated Ardrey and Lorenz to the ranks of unpersons, but they were not quite so delusional.  They knew who their most effective opponents were, and they set it all down in black and white in no uncertain terms in Man and Aggression.  For anyone who cares to fact check Pinker’s “official history,” that invaluable little book is still available in paperback at Amazon for the bargain basement price of one cent.

In a word then, Lorenz deserves a lot more respect than he gets in Pinker’s yarn, or in the sanitized “histories” that are fed to unwitting undergraduates in the current crop of Evolutionary Psychology textbooks, and he deserved the Nobel Prize he was awarded for his work in 1973, two years before Wilson published On Human Nature.  Why, then, do I find his philosophy “forgettable.”  It seems to me that, just as Einstein should have stayed out of politics, a field in which he was easily manipulated by the unscrupulous ideologues of his day, Lorenz should have left the philosophizing to Kant and Hegel.  Alas, he had drunk too deeply in those waters.  Like Don Quixote, who, Cervantes tells us, read stirring tales of knight-errantry until he became a bold knight himself in his imagination, Lorenz thought to save the world with his philosophy.  He could sling epistomologies, ontologies, and teleologies with as much panache as the best of them, and so he did in a number of his lesser known works.

It happens I have just waded through one of them, entitled The Waning of Humaneness, a somewhat rough approximation of the German title, Der Abbau des Menschlichen, which conveys more of the flavor of Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), a work which Lorenz often cites.  Written in 1983 when Lorenz was 79 years old, the book is a mish-mash of stuff taken, sometimes word for word, from his earlier books, dubious claims about the origin of values, even more dubious prescriptions for restoring them so that humaneness stops waning, all in a melange of simplistic pontification about preserving the environment inspired, we are informed, by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

To enlist the help of others in restoring “humaneness,” it is first necessary to explain to them what it is.  It turns out that humaneness is as similar to all the other noble causes that have disturbed the tranquility of mankind since time immemorial as one pea to all the others in a pod.  In short, Humaneness is what Lorenz thinks is Good.  It’s not very original as Goods go.  In the Foreword we are informed that it consists of restoring the environment and reversing the cultural “decadence” with which its degradation goes hand in hand.  This is to be done by restoring “true” morality and values.  Of course, the rub, as with all such systems, lies in establishing the legitimacy of the Good.  Why is the Good really good?

In the case of Lorenz, the task of establishing this legitimacy would seem particularly daunting.  After all, he was a pioneer in establishing the innate, genetically programmed component of human morality.  By no means does he renounce his earlier work.  In fact, he actually cites it.  For example, reiterating his earlier claims about the ancient wellsprings of the emotions that influence human behavior he writes,

Based on genetic programming are not only the apparatuses for sensory perception and for logical thinking that outline and fill in with color the picture we have of our world; also based on these programs are the complicated feelings that determine our interhuman behavior.  Our social behavior especially is dominated by an immensely old heritage of species-specific action and reaction patterns; these are undoubtedly much, much older than the specific capacities of intelligence associated with our neocortex, that is, with the evolutionarily youngest part of our brain.

and,

It is beyond doubt that a great number of qualitative emotions, recognizable and unmistakable, are common to all mankind, that is, are anchored in the genes of humans.

So far so good.  However, these innate traits, as well as the various culturally transmitted modes of behavior to which they give rise haven’t kept up with the pace of technological and cultural change.

…many of the innate as well as traditional norms of humans that were still well-adapted programs of social and economic behavior just a short while ago today contribute to the waning of what is humane.

Again, if we can drop the “waning of humaneness” jargon and simply say that these behavioral traits have become maladaptive, Lorenz is merely reiterating truths that have, in the meantime, become obvious to all but the most diehard and ancient of blank slaters.  But it is just here that Lorenz, along with so many others who have more or less accepted the facts as set forth above, run off the tracks.

It seems clear to me that, if the ultimate cause of human behavior (and moral behavior, however defined, is merely a subset thereof), lies in the evolved features of our brains, then there can be no possible legitimate basis for one human being to claim that what his subjective emotions portray to him as the Good must also be the Good for everyone else.  This pervasive illusion, cause of so much human misery, should finally be recognized as such and jettisoned once and for all.  But in spite of the demise of the Blank Slate, in spite of a tidal wave of papers in scholarly journals on innate behavior, and in spite of a continuing flood of books on themes such as hard-wired morality and the moral behavior of animals, that isn’t about to happen.  The emotional high of feeling morally superior to lesser mortals is just too sweet and savory to dispense with.  Orgasms of self-righteousness and virtuous indignation are almost as satisfying as the sexual kind, and they last a lot longer.  But to experience them in all their glory, the Good must be justified.

Lorenz goes about the task without much virtuosity, but with a few idiosyncratic twists.  In short, he admits that values are subjective, but claims that they are, nevertheless, real.  As he puts it:

What must be made clear, and convincingly, is that our subjective experiential processes possess the same degree of reality as everything that can be expressed in the terminologies of the exact natural sciences. …Since all of the moral responsibilities of humans are determined by their perceptions of values, the epidemic delusion that only numerical and measurable reality has validity must be confronted and contradicted.

Certainly our subjective impressions are real and do actually exist in the sense that they result from observable and measurable physical phenomena in our brains. The non sequitur here is that, simply by virtue of the fact that they do actually exist in that fashion, they thereby acquire some sort of objective legitimacy.  Some more or less similar leap of faith is always necessary to establish a moral system.  Somehow, a subjective impression must be promoted to the Good, an objective thing in itself.  Only in that form can it acquire the power of serving as an imperative for all mankind.  It seems to have occurred to Lorenz that his claim of objective validity by virtue of subjective reality is a rather threadbare variant of this essential sleight of hand.  To prop it up, he drags in Beauty.

For all the value perceptions of humans that have been discussed up to now, the assumption is justified that these sensibilities assist the individual in advantageous achievements and, therewith, the assumption is also justified that their programs as well, through selection of these achievements, have evolved in typical ways.  But there is the beautiful, the genesis of which in a similar manner must be doubted, for which, in fact, an explication of origin by means of selection seems conspicuously contrived.

If Lorenz’ argument for the special status of Beauty gives you a faint sense of a televangelist arguing for the special status of divine creation, you’re not alone.  Cutting to the chase, in the final chapter the author reveals himself as a theist.  We finally detect the supernatural stiffening behind all this flimsy stuff about Beauty and Values.  Nature is “really beautiful” and “true values” are really legitimate because God wants it that way.

Lorenz’ suggestions for turning the humaneness curve back in the right direction are paltry enough.  Even in 1983 he was still feeling the afterglow of the 60′s youth fetish.  (As a baby boomer myself, I cannot but feel a distinct relief that my generation, the object of all that obsession with “youth,” has finally reached retirement age).   As usual, we were to redeem mankind from its horrible fate:

The predicament of young people today is especially critical.  Forestalling the threatening apocalypse will devolve on their perceptions of value; their sensibilities of the beautiful and worthwhile must be aroused and renewed.

And how was this arousal and renewal to be brought about?

It must still, in some way, be possible to provide even those children born and reared in large cities with some kind of opportunity for developing their capacities to perceive the harmony and disharmony of living systems – if only by means of an aquarium.  Those children who are given a chance to tend to aquarium and to care for its inhabitants come to learn, through necessity, to comprehend a functioning entirety in its harmony and disharmony, an entirety bringing together and combining very many systems consisting of animals, plants, bacteria and an entire range of inorganic givens, systems that complement one another and systems that are antagonistic to one another.  Children would learn how delicate the equilibrium of such an artificial ecological system is.

It may seem uncharitable to dismiss the aquarium idea.  After all, we’ve tried pretty much everything else.  However, I can assure the reader that, as a child, my teachers had me tend to both an aquarium and a beehive for good measure, and look how I turned out.

The Waning of Humaneness contains a good deal more of puerile stuff about corporate war profiteers, the evils of nuclear energy, canned homilies about saving the environment, the stupidity of Americans who live in suburban subdivisions, tiresomely repetitious warnings about the impending suicide of mankind, etc., but that can rest.  Konrad Lorenz was, after all, a great man.  Working in his own specialty, he struck a telling blow at the Blank Slate, one of the most pernicious pseudo-religions that ever claimed the name of science.  Let us remember and honor him for that.

Ingroups and Outgroups: All Things Old are New Again

According to an article I just ran across on the World Science website, scientists have just “discovered” that “Human prejudice may date back 25 million years or more.” On closer reading, one finds that what they have just “discovered” has been obvious since the days of Darwin; that we humans group others of our species into ingroups and outgroups. Sir Arthur Keith summarized earlier work on the subject and put it on a firm theoretical basis well over half a century ago. As Robert Ardrey, who called it the Amity/Enmity Complex, wrote of it a couple of decades later, it was, “the resolution of a paradox posed by Darwin, solved by Wallace, explored by Spencer and Sumner, revived and extended by Keith, and for the last twenty years cast aside (by the “Blank Slaters”, ed.) under the pretense it does not exist.”  Ardrey went on to say, “What seems to have occurred to no one, excepting possibly Keith, is that the animal is a moral being, and that human morality is a simple evolutionary extension of a form of conduct which has existed in nature for many hundreds of millions of years.  But unless we inspect both the history of the falsehood and the history of the truth, we shall not in least part grasp our contemporary predicament.”

In this “enlightened” age, when an increasing stream of books like Wild Justice:  The Moral Lives of Animals by Bekoff and Pierce and Primates and Philosophers:  How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal et. al., are rolling off the presses, one would think that brilliant thinkers like Ardrey and Keith, triumphantly vindicated, would receive the tardy recognition they deserve.  If so, one would be very mistaken.  You see, Ardrey was a mere playwright, guilty of the unpardonable lèse-majesté of challenging the entire establishment of behavioral scientists of his day and proving them wrong, and Keith was presumptuous in writing down such ideas before the official “beginning” of Evolutionary Psychology as set forth in the mythical histories of the science set forth in the modern textbooks on the subject.

Of Ingroups, Outgroups, and Global Climate Change

As I pointed out in my last post, “The outgroup have ye always with you.” Of all the very good reasons for mankind to give up the cobbling together of new moral systems once and for all, it’s probably the best. It’s more likely you’ll find a unicorn browsing in your back yard than one of the pathologically pious among us suffused with the milk of human kindness. One typically finds them in their “ground state,” frothing at the the mouth with virtuous indignation over the latest sins of their preferred outgroup.

So it is with Eugene Robinson, one of their number who happens to pen an occasional column in the Washington Post. He recently delivered himself of some observations concerning the phenomenon of global warming. As anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last decade will be aware, no branch of the sciences has been more afflicted of late by the attentions of the professionally righteous than climatology. Robinson gives us a good example of how the neat separation of climate scientists into good guys and bad guys works in practice.

Hero of his piece is one Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who, we learn, once dismissed “climate alarmism” as “shoddy science.” Not to worry. Though once lost, he is now found, and though once blind, he now sees. It turns out the scales fell from his eyes after he “launched his own comprehensive study (referred to as the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, or BEST, study, ed.) to set the record straight,” and discovered that, lo and behold, “Global warming is real.” Well, perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. I happen to believe that the arguments as to why it should be real are plausible enough, but that’s beside the point as far as this post is concerned.

What is to the point is Robinson’s reaction to all this. For him, Muller’s study isn’t just another batch of data points relating to a very complex scientific issue. For him, global warming is an absolute and incontrovertable certainty, because it represents the “good.” Muller’s study is, therefore, not just a scientific study, but a victory in the eternal battle of good versus evil. In Robinson’s own words,

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention.

But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer,” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

and so on. As it happens, not all of the “skeptics” have been reduced to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence. Take, for example, Judith Curry, a distinguished climate researcher and Chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. She was actually a member of Muller’s team, and so is presumably familiar with the copious data Robinson was so enthused about. However, in an interview for the Daily Mail, Curry accuses Muller of “trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.” She also says that, “Prof. Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis,” and goes so far as to compare the affair to “Climategate.” This is strong stuff, but Prof. Curry has the goods. She notes that, in carefully sifting through, as Robinson informs us, “1.6 billion records,” Muller somehow failed to mention that, according to BEST’s own data, “there has been no significant increase in world temperatures since the end of the 90′s.” The following two graphs from the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation summarize that data:

Source: Global Warming Policy Foundation

It would seem that the good Prof. Muller, who had much to say about the first graph, complete with “hockey stick,” somehow forgot to mention the data in the second. In fact, as Prof. Curry put it, “…in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.”

The Daily Mail article contains much else in the way of less than pleased reactions by a number of other climatologists at what was apparently a premature release of the BEST data before the peer review process was complete. Of course, all this fits very ill with the lurid picture of good triumphing over evil painted for us by Mr. Robinson. Predictably, while he was apparently observant enough to turn up any number of “grumbling and stunned” warming deniers, when it came to Prof. Curry and her equally chagrined colleagues, he didn’t notice a thing.

It should come as no surprise. Mr. Curry is merely acting as one might expect of a member of a species endowed with certain innate behavioral characteristics. Some of those traits give rise to what is commonly referred to as moral behavior, and none of us are free of their emotional grip. That’s why Hollywood still makes movies about good guys and bad guys. It is our subjective nature to perceive sublime good, but the yin of sublime good cannot exist without the yang of despicable evil. Every ingroup implies an outgroup. There is little we can do to change our nature, and we would probably be unwise to try given our current intellectual endowments. We can, however, while accepting it for what it is, seek to find ways of channeling its expression in ways less destructive than we have experienced in the past. At the very least we need to understand it and develop an awareness of how it affects our behavior. The results of failing to do so in the past have been destructive enough, and have certainly made a hash of the science of climatology. The results of failing to do so in the future are unlikely to be any more encouraging.

Of Karl Radek, Communism and Human Nature

In 1935, a collection of essays by the Soviet journalist Karl Radek was published under the title Portraits and Pamphlets.  Radek was, by all accounts, a brilliant man.  At the time he was one of the editors of Izvestia, a frequent writer for Pravda, and was reputed to be the foremost propagandist in the Soviet Union.  He had been connected with various workers movements since the age of 14, and had become editor of The Red Flag, the organ of the Social Democratic Party in his home country of Poland, at the age of 20.  The book was published near the apogee of the love affair of public intellectuals in the “bourgeois” democracies with Communism.  Impressed by the Soviet Union’s apparent success in realizing its bold economic aspirations in the midst of a lingering Great Depression, mainstream journals such as The Nation, The New Republic, and The American Mercury were publishing articles that were unabashedly pro-Communist, marked by the tacit assumption that a transition to socialism was inevitable.  The only question remaining was how that transition would occur.  The book reflected this state of affairs.  In an introduction contributed by the normally phlegmatic historian A. J. Cummings we read,

The Soviets have proved beyond any reasonable doubt not only the stability of their regime, but their capacity, in the face of an incredulous world, to carry into effect a large part of their gigantic economic conceptions. They have also made abundantly clear their intention to keep the peace and their desire to organize an international peace system. The entrance of Russia into the League of Nations, more even than her series of agreements with individual states, marks a turning point in European history.

Five years later, of course, the Soviets demonstrated their “abundantly clear intention to keep the peace” by invading and seizing large parts of Finland, annexing the Baltic states, and partitioning Poland with Nazi Germany.  No matter, all that belonged to the future.  Radek’s essays began with a groveling panegyric dedicated to Stalin.  At the time, “The Great Helmsman” had already begun to bare his teeth.  Former leading Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested as early as December, 1934, and were soon to appear in the second of the carefully rehearsed show trials that would lead to their execution.  The Great Purge Trials were only a few years off.  Radek was much too astute not to sense what was in the air.  He knew he was at risk because of an earlier flirtation with Stalin’s bete noir Trotsky over the issue of socialism in one country.  The tone of the essay was accordingly abject and fawning.  In keeping with the spirit of the times, all this was neatly rationalized by English Communist Alec Brown, who provided notes to the essays.  In his words,

We mostly see only what we have been trained to see by upbringing, environment and habit. Thus, the average British reader of Radek’s paper on Stalin is, until he gives it more thought, bound to be inclined to see hero-worship, and to be quite blind to what Radek really is about. But as this paper on Stalin turns on the essential harmony between communism and individuality – on the way the one necessitates and breeds the other – it is worth while drawing attention to the basic feature of the Marxist-Leninist Party, ignorance of or misunderstanding of which leads to the rather comical confusion made by the average non-Marxist student of the civilization of the future… Further it cannot be made too clear that this Marxist non-individualist scientific approach to social problems does not stultify individual life… And it follows that since the ‘man at the top’ owes his position not to any ‘personal magnetism’ or sex appeal, but to the very same qualities which make a great leader of science, plus tested personal courage, it makes possible really honest praise of a great man, a praise which is the very opposite to hero-worship.

Be that as it may, Radek’s “really honest praise” didn’t sway Stalin.  He was arrested and tried for “treason” two years after the book was published, and was shot by the NKVD in 1939.  How is it that seemingly grownup, sober people could be taken in by these deadly charades over and over again?  The same way they have always been taken in – by virtue of ardently believing in something that is palpably untrue.  Historically, that something has typically been a religion.  “Scientific” Communism was, for all practical purposes, a religion as well, and has been easily recognizable as such from the earliest days.  Astute observers have likened Communist and socialist bigwigs to so many cardinals, bishops, and popes since long before the days of Lenin.  The fact that Communism was different from its more traditional analogs by virtue of being secular rather than spiritual altered nothing in its fundamental nature.  That fact was appreciated as early as the first half of the 19^th century by the brilliant British essayist, Sir James MacKintosh.  It happens that the ideology of “class struggle” was already highly developed in his day, well before the time of Marx.  Presciently, he pointed out that such doctrines were eventually bound to fail, because they promised an illusory paradise on earth, rather than in the hereafter.  Having the advantage of not being dead, the “liberated” people were bound to eventually look around and take notice of the fact that the promised paradise was nowhere to be seen. 

Eventually, that’s just what happened in the Soviet Union, and its demise meant the end of Communism as a messianic world view, although the name lingers on.  The paradise went bankrupt.  We are left with the question of why, if an astute Englishman could see it all coming almost two centuries ago, so many seemingly intelligent and highly educated people were so completely taken in by Communism for so long, in spite of purge trials, mass slaughter, and human misery on a vast scale.

The answer lies in human nature.  Of Communism as a framework for social organization, E. O. Wilson once famously quipped, “Great theory, wrong species.”  That was certainly true as far as its outcome and practicality are concerned, but far off the mark in terms of its power as a messianic world view.  Indeed, its compelling power in the latter capacity was a reflection of its perfect harmony with human nature. 

Specifically, Communism was extremely effective at exploiting those aspects of human nature we associate with morality.  Its adherents sought to achieve the ultimate “good,” in the form of the future felicity of mankind, or, as latter day architects of the latest moral systems might put it, “human flourishing.”  They achieved all the emotional satisfaction that human beings have always derived from serving a cause they believe is noble and good, in company with other, like-minded individuals, the fellow members of what one might call their tribe, or ingroup.  They derived an emotional satisfaction just as powerful by opposing the ultimate “evil,” which, in their case, was represented by the bourgeoisie.  Any opposition outside the ingroup or heresy within was associated with the bourgeois outgroup.  No matter if the enemy of the moment had no perceptible control over the social means of production.  In that case, one merely added a qualifier, such as “petty” bourgeoisie, and the association with evil was complete.  Eventually, the whole movement came under the control of the ultimate high priest in the person of Stalin, who disposed of his rivals, including Radek and all the rest of the old Bolsheviks of any talent who had actually carried out the “proletarian” revolution, by transmuting them, in turn, into “bourgeoisie.” 

And therein lays the fundamental fallacy of most of the modern cobblers of novel, revamped, and refurbished moralities.  In spite of the fact that all human history dangles it in front of their faces, somehow they always seem to manage to ignore the dual nature of human morality.  Every good implies an evil.  Every ingroup implies an outgroup.  Their fond hopes of “dialing up the knobs” controlling who we include in our ingroups to all mankind are doomed to failure because they ignore these fundamental truths about human nature.  There will always be a “bourgeoisie.”  Its identities are legion.  The Jews, heretics, global corporations, racial and ethnic minorities by the score; all these and many others have played the role of outgroup at one time or another.  Our nature predisposes us to identify an outgroup, and to treat those we identify with it with all the scorn, spite, and contempt that human beings have always reserved for outgroups.  We’ve been running a repeatable experiment that has abundantly confirmed this easily falsifiable fact for the last 5,000 years.  It’s called history.  Communism is merely one of the most recent of a mountain of data points that all point to this same fundamental truth.  Great thinkers like Arthur Keith, Konrad Lorenz, and Robert Ardrey have all pointed to this seemingly obvious aspect of our nature, and suggested that, instead of trying to wish it away, we seek to understand and control it.  I would suggest that the clever young scientists in fields such as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience who have already brought about a paradigm shift in the behavioral sciences in recent years heed their advice.  We would do well to learn to understand ourselves.  Failing that, I expect there will be a great many more Karl Radeks in our future.

Karl Radek

In the Garden of the Amity/Enmity Complex

Behavioral scientists of the old school would call the Amity/Enmity Complex a “just so story.”  In other words, it’s a universal phenomenon, observable in countless instances in both humans and other animals, inexplicable other than as a manifestation of an innate behavioral trait, but something that they find inconvenient for ideological reasons and therefore choose to deny and ignore.  To justify this seemingly irrational denial of the obvious, they demand a standard of proof that such traits exist immeasurably stronger than that they apply to “proved scientific facts,” by which they mean far flimsier hypotheses that happen to have the virtue of  agreeing with a preferred narrative.   

Briefly put, the Amity/Enmity Complex refers to our innate tendency to categorize others of our species into in-groups and out-groups, favoring the former and hating and despising the latter. As the great anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith put it, “Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.”  Today the Complex is commonly referred to as in-group/out-group behavior, but I see no need to conform to the constantly shifting nuances of jargon in the behavioral sciences.

China’s Great Cultural Revolution was a great tragedy.  It was also a perfect illustration of the Complex in action.  In 1966 the bored old man who happened to run China at the time decided that the Chinese Communist Party and society at large were permeated by a “bourgeois spirit,” and that what the country needed was more revolutionary spirit.  He decided to shake things up a bit.  What happened next is summed up in Wikipedia as follows:

On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the CPC passed its “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (also known as “the 16 Points”). This decision defined the GPCR as “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, a deeper and more extensive stage”:

“Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavor to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: It must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”

The decision thus took the already existing student movement and elevated it to the level of a nationwide mass campaign, calling on not only students but also “the masses of the workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals, and revolutionary cadres” to carry out the task of “transforming the superstructure” by writing big-character posters and holding “great debates.”

In the intervening years many eyewitnesses have published vignettes of what happened next including Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang, and China’s Son by Da Chen.  One of the most interesting is Born Red, a fine piece of writing by Gao Yuan.  It is a case study in how new in-group/out-group relationships emerged in the supposedly “classless” society that was established in the wake of the Communist victory, how easy it was to inflame them against each other, how seemingly insignificant and incomprehensible differences between them were magnified until they assumed earthshaking importance in the minds of the opposing factions, how loyalty to the in-group inspired acts of fearless bravado, “heroism,” and even martyrdom, and, in the end, how all the resulting chaos and mayhem were finally stopped and society returned to “normal.”  In short, the Revolution was an experiment in human psychology on a massive scale, demonstrating the manifestation of an ancient and innate human behavioral trait in a world  far different from the one in which it evolved.

The Amity/Enmity Complex describes the interplay of in-groups and out-groups and, of course, Communism has always had its own idiosyncratic out-group.  It is the bourgeoisie, technically the private owners of the social means of production, but a term that has often been expanded to include peasants with slightly more land or slightly more productive and affluent than their neighbors, workers who were somewhat better off than average, people whose houses were larger than a certain size, or anyone else with some kind of a real or imagined privilege.  So it was that, when the Great Cultural Revolution was launched, it began with the posting of innumerable “dazibao,” or “big character posters,” attacking the “bourgeoisie.”  It couldn’t be just a vague, general bourgeoisie.  Individuals were needed.  The party helped things along with its suggestion that the “criticism” start with “reactionary bourgeois academic authorities.”  Thus, teachers and school administrators were among the first victims of the dazibao smears.  They were associated with a host of evil traits that have been associated with out-groups since the dawn of time.  For example, they were “impure” and “dirty,” by virtue of “bourgeois” parents, grandparents or other associations.  They were the essence of evil by virtue of their opposition to the embodiment of good, in the person of Mao and his “revolutionary line.”  They were guilty by virtue of association with evil incarnate in the person of Chiang Kai Shek and his Guomintang Party.  All these charges were usually baseless slander, but the “revolutionary masses” of students made them stick.  After all, in-groups must have out-groups, even if it’s necessary to invent them out of whole cloth.     

Eventually, the in-groups began to turn their wrath against each other.  Nothing was easier than to convince themselves that the “others,” too, were “dirty,” “impure,” and “evil” distorters of the pure revolutionary line of Mao, just like the school authorities.  They began to “struggle” against each other.  Starting with dazibao, the means of “struggle” became ever more violent and destructive, escalating to fists, spears and slingshots with crude armor, homemade grenades, and, eventually firearms.  Captured opponents, people who had formerly been friends, schoolmates and neighbors, were beaten, viciously tortured, maimed, and occasionally killed.  The author tells of one young girl who, on the point of being captured by the “enemy,” committed suicide by throwing herself from an upper story window rather than be “defiled” by contact with the out-group.  Anyone who failed to take part in these sanguinary and seemingly senseless battles, or who sought to “desert,” became the target of all the opprobrium traditionally heaped on “traitors.” 

And so it continued until Mao, finally tiring of the sport or deciding his political goal of consolidating power had been accomplished, called the whole thing off in 1969.  The active phase of the revolution sputtered on for a while, ending for good only with the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.  Their mortal deity having passed from the scene, the contending factions forgot all the reasons for their mutual hatred that had formerly seemed of such earth shattering importance.  Disavowed by the powers that had called them into existence, and having no legitimacy but that conferred by a man who was now dead, the in-groups collapsed, and their members disbanded and went back to their “normal” lives.  In the epilogue, the author, who had emigrated to America in the meantime, recounts how he went back to visit some of his former enemies and torturers.  All acted as if the whole thing had been a bad dream.

We have all seen it happen over and over and over again, across nations, cultures, tribes and societies of all stripes.  We have seen the incarnations of the Complex in the form of racism, religious bigotry, anti-Semitism, and countless other “isms.” The details change, but the fundamental nature of the behavior is always the same.  Isn’t it time to recognize the fact that our five thousand years of recorded history of the same phenomenon over and over again wasn’t just a coincidence?  If there is any reason for optimism about the Chinese experience, it is that it was neither inevitable that the Complex become active and virulent as it did, nor was it impossible to suppress and control once people with the necessary authority finally realized how destructive it had become.   If that experience is any guide, surely we are intelligent enough to control an innate behavioral trait that exists because it promoted our survival at some point in the distant past, but has now become the most likely source of our potential self-destruction.  We cannot, however, effectively control it until we recognize it for what it is, accept its existence, and stop covering our eyes, stopping up our ears, and shouting “just so story” because the Amity/Enmity Complex doesn’t fit in the “nice” world of our fond imaginations.  It’s time to end the denial.  We’ve graduated far beyond dazibao and slingshots to nuclear weapons.  It has become much too dangerous to refuse to understand ourselves in the name of preserving a world that never was.

“Demonic Males” and the Original Sin of the Apes

I can imagine little that it is more important for us to learn the truth about than our own nature.  If we fail to learn that truth we literally put our survival at risk.  Under the circumstances, it is all the more disturbing that we have a history of obfuscating the path to that truth with pleasant ideological myths.  We have been making progress.  One of the most pernicious, tenacious, and dangerous myths, that of the Blank Slate, seems finally to have collapsed, buried by common sense and a mountain of evidence that, in the end, became so great that it couldn’t be hand-waved away, even by the time-honored tactic of demonizing the messengers. 

Some of the most damning evidence came from primatologists, who finally began to give us accurate information on our closest animal relatives, the great apes.  Less than half a century ago, our “scientific” knowledge of their behavioral traits was a farrago of the most ridiculous fairy tales.  As recently as 1968, blank slater Ashley Montagu could write with a perfectly straight face, and without fear of contradiction,

The field studies of Schaller on the gorilla, of Goodall on the chimpanzee, of Harrison 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, and there is not the least reason to suppose that man’s prehuman primate ancestors were in any way different.

Alas, in the fullness of time, the apes, too, were roused from their reverie in the Garden of Eden and shown the door.  I recommend Demonic Males by primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson to anyone who wants to read the details of how we finally discovered that they had actually been munching the forbidden apples all along.  The book was originally published in 1996, but I hadn’t actually read it until recently.  Peterson cites a blurb from Publisher’s Weekly that sums it up nicely:

Contradicting the common belief that chimpanzees in the wild are gentle creatures, Harvard anthropologist Wrangham and science writer Peterson have witnessed, since 1971, male African chimpanzees carry out rape, border raids, brutal beatings and warfare among rival territorial gangs. In a startling, beautifully written, riveting, provocative inquiry, they suggest that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human warfare, which would make modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.

The books main virtue is the wealth of observations and studies it pulls together of the behavior of both apes and human hunter-gatherers.  Some excerpts:

That male orangutans regularly rape must be one of the best-kept secrets in the literature of popular zoology.

(Referring to gorillas) When a male kills her infant, the female is an established member of an existing troop, while the killer male is a stranger. If she has seen him before, it has been only during violent interactions when he challenged her mate – a patent threat to her infant, a blur of power as he rammed through the vegetation before being stopped, outfought, and repelled by the resident silverback. And now he has succeeded in his aim. He has managed to get past the defenses of her mate. He has charged directly up to her, even as she screamed and fought back, and in a terrifying show of mastery, he has torn her baby from her and killed it in an instant.

Fists can also grasp invented weapons. Chimpanzees today are close to using hand-held weapons. Throughout the continent, wild chimpanzees will tear off and throw great branches when they are angry or threatened, or they will pick up and throw rocks. Humphrey, when he was the alpha male at Gombe, almost killed me once by sending a melon-size rock whistling less than half a meter from my head. They also hit with big sticks. A celebrated film taken in Guinea shows wild chimpanzees pounding meter-long clubs down on the back of a leopard.

The latter paragraph is of particular significance in view of a remarkable taphonomic finding by South African Prof. Raymond Dart regarding the prevalence of antelope humerus bones among those taken from a cave in the Makapan Valley.  The bones, found in association with those of Australopithecus africanus, represented no less than 11% of the all the identifiable types.  They would have made ideal double headed clubs, and there was other evidence to indicate that is exactly what they were used for.  Another anomalously prevalent bone present was  the lower jaw of a small antelope that would have been ideal as a slashing or cutting tool.  Published in 1953, Dart’s masterful statistical study was “refuted” in a later work by C. K. Brain, who, not bothering to address Dart’s statistical anomalies, naively claimed that all the bones had been dragged into the cave by leopards and other large predators.  Brain has been busily publishing refutations of his “refutation” in recent years.  Apparently he realizes that others can look at the evidence for themselves and, if they do, are likely to find gaping holes in his work that they’re not quite as likely to be silent about as they might have been a couple of decades ago.  In spite of that, as far as I know he has never apologized for the damage he did to Dart’s reputation.  At the time it was published, of course, Brain’s flawed work was eagerly lapped up by blank slaters far and wide as “proof” that Dart had been wrong.  If you look around on Google, you can still find a few of their productions, most of them remarkable for the trademark pious indignation they reserve for anyone who dares to threaten their ideological certainties.  To this day, no one has ever succeeded in explaining away Dart’s statistical argument.  It has simply been ignored.  Perhaps it is time the data was revisited.

The book is thought provoking on many levels, and is one of the few recent works on innate human behavior that seriously discusses the issue of aggression, a major theme of early opponents of the blank slate like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz.  Many of them are flawed attempts to “emphasize the positive,” and cobble together new moral systems based on misguided notions of “dialing up” the level of human altruism, accommodating modern political correctness to dubious versions of innate behavior in the same way the blank slate used to accommodate Marxism.  It would be well if we could finally pull our heads out of that particular hole in the sand once and for all.

Demonic Males includes several of Wrangham’s fanciful hypotheses, such as the “bulb eating” transition from ape to man, and the notion that human warfare is the result of “pride.”  The latter is remarkable, in view of the inevitable vagueness of the term “pride,” but more importantly because Wrangham is clearly aware of and understands what seems to me (not to mention Ardrey and Lorenz) a much more likely explanation; namely ingroup-outgroup behavior, or, as Ardrey referred to it, the Amity/Enmity Complex.   The book actually includes a very interesting and quite detailed discussion of the phenomenon, with some data that I had not previously seen, all of it a seemingly compelling argument in favor of its role in warfare.  In spite of that, the author somehow managed to convince himself that warfare is all about “pride.”  “Pride,” in the sense that Wrangham uses it, is far more plausible in the context of intra-group struggles for status than as an explanation of inter-group warfare.  Regardless, it in no way detracts from the significance of the book, which is important because of the source material it makes accessible to a popular audience more than for Wrangham’s theories.

The significance of books like this is nicely summed up by Wrangham himself;

Our Pleistocene ancestors were beleaguered by their own demonic males, surely. But they didn’t have automatic rifles, fertilizer bombs, dynamite, nerve gas, Stealth bombers, or nuclear weapons. We do, and therein lies the danger.

Those words might have been taken directly from one of Ardrey’s books.  Indeed, the source material presented in Demonic Males is a triumphant vindication of Ardrey, whose core ideas were always that innate factors influence human behavior, and not all of them predispose us to be kind and inoffensive.  As a reward for being right on those fundamental truths, his legacy has been distorted beyond recognition, and his name has been nearly forgotten.  But I digress.  I will have more to say about Ardrey in later posts. 

Another interesting phenomenon is discussed at length in Demonic Males; the remarkable behavioral differences between chimpanzees and bonobos.  That, however, is also a topic for another day.