Remembering Communism

We live in sedate times, at least from an ideological point of view.  Such excrescences of the 20th century as Nazism and fascism have come and gone.  The greatest messianic world view of them all, Communism, if not stone cold dead, is no more than a shadow of its former self.  With its demise, its very memory is passing into oblivion.  That’s unfortunate.  Given the cost of the Communist experiment – 100 million dead and the virtual beheading of at least two countries, Russia and Cambodia – we would do well to at least learn something from it.

It seems to me that one particularly profound lesson is the degree to which vast numbers of intellectuals the world over were capable of deluding themselves about the nature of the Stalinist regime, renowned scientists among them.  Malcolm Muggeridge chronicled the phenomena in his brilliant little snapshot of the time, The Thirties.  For example,

Admiration for the Soviet regime had greatly increased since the introduction of the Five-Year Plan in 1929, though more among Liberals and the professional classes than among trade unionists, who from the beginning showed themselves to be less easily deluded by Soviet propaganda than university professors, writers and clergymen.  Professor Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed.), for instance, had no difficulty in believing that ‘while we were in Russia a German town-planning expert was travelling over the huge Siberian spaces in a special train with a staff of assistants, where cities are to arise stopping for a few days, picking out the best site, laying down the broad outlines of the future city, and passing on, leaving the details to be filled in by architects and engineers who remain’ or that ‘Stalin himself sometimes comes down to the Moscow goods sidings to help.’

 

The cost of a tour in the USSR, though moderate, was beyond the means of most manual workers, so that those who availed themselves of the exceedingly competent Intourist organization were predominantly income-tax payers.  Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to this delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of the age.

 

The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university-educated tourists astonished even Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors.

 

The climax came, perhaps, with the visit to the USSR of Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor and Lord Lothian, which provided, as Mr. Eugene Lyons has put it, ‘a fortnight of clowning… The lengthening obscenity of ignorant or indifferent tourists disporting themselves cheerily on the aching body of Russia, seemed summed up in this cavorting old man, in his blanket endorsement of what he would not understand.  He was so taken up with demonstrating how youthful and agile he was that he had no attention to spare for the revolution in practice.

 

Despite such episodes the Soviet regime continued to be held in ever greater esteem by writers like Shaw and Andre Gide and Romain Rolland:  clergymen like the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, journalists like Walter Duranty and Maurice Hindus, economists like G. D. H. Cole and the Webbs (Sidney and Beatrice, Fabian socialists, ed.) scientists like Professor Julian Huxley.  How could all these, so learned and to righteous, be wrong?

 

…like vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut-cutlets.

 

All this is doubly astounding in light of the fact that it was so obvious at the time all this was going on that the Soviet Union had become a vast charnel house.  Indeed, Muggeridge himself had sympathized with the new regime.  The scales fell from his eyes when he took an unauthorized trip to the Ukraine while visiting the Soviet Union, and saw the starvation and misery there first hand, even as Walter Duranty was denying it in the New York Times.  The Eugene Lyons Muggeridge refers to above was a journalist who spent six years in the Soviet Union and was not as easily duped as Duranty.  He wrote a damning indictment of the regime in his book, Moscow Carrousel.  In a synopsis of his findings written for the American Mercury in 1936 in the context of a review of the Webb’s ecstatic praise of the regime in their book, Soviet Communism:  A New Civilization?, he wrote,

The material out of which the Webbs have fashioned their Utopia is that theoretical USSR of governmental forms, paper freedoms, poster proletarians, stage kulaks, decrees, and charts – the immense make-believe of externals under which all governments, especially all-powerful, all-knowing and infallible super-states, function.

 

One is tempted to quote endlessly from the curious mixture of misinformation, half-truths, and naive credulity which fill these volumes.  The liquidation of the kulaks, for instance, becomes under the busy pens of the Webbs almost an act of benevolence.  These poor people, it appears, would have starved to death had not the authorities come along mercifully and transferred them free of charge to the lumber camps and canal diggings.

 

The discussion of other aspects of the terror is in the same key.  Everything that might reflect on the institution of the OGPU (secret police, ed.) is dismissed with a sneer… The whole complex of forced and convict labor involving millions of persons (hundreds of thousands are building canals and railroads at this very moment); the mass executions without public trial; the teeming concentration camps; all of this the Webbs judge on the basis of official statements, official silences, and the mendacities of ill-informed foreign parrots.

 

Lyons’ article is interesting in that it documents the fact that the truth about the mass slaughter underway in the Soviet Union was perfectly obvious to anyone who didn’t deliberately delude themselves, even in 1936, before the climax of the Great Purge Trials in 1937 and 1938.  Which begs the question, why were so many seemingly intelligent people so delusional for so long?  The question was answered by Julius Caesar over 2000 years ago:  “People willingly believe what they want to believe.”  And many intellectuals of the time dearly wanted to believe in socialism, if not Communism.  Many of them shared Maxim Gorky’s belief that democracy was impossible without it.  Ironically, they included George Orwell, certainly no Stalinist or Communist, but a lifelong socialist, who never realized his work would deal such a telling blow to socialism until it was too late.  In his essays before the war, he actually claimed that there was no moral distinction between the Nazi and British versions of capitalism.  For example, in an essay entitled “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” that appeared in the New English Weekly in 1937, he wrote,

You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”, meaning capitalism.  But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois “democracy” are Tweedledum and Tweedledee… If the British public had been given a truthful account of the Spanish war (in which Orwell was a combatant, ed.) they would have had an opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated.  As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps (British icon of reaction, ed.) bombinating in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever.  And thus we are one step nearer to the great war “against Fascism” (cf 1914, “against militarism”) which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.

Orwell’s comment throws a great deal of light on the phenomenon of mass self-delusion noted above.  By the 1930′s more than a century of socialist philosophers and propagandists, of whom Marx, Engels and Lenin were some of the more prominent examples, had elevated socialism to a quasi-religion.  The brilliant Scotchman, Sir James MacKintosh, had already noticed the trend in the early 1800′s, long before Marx appeared on the scene, observing that the new religion was bound to fail eventually, because it promised an unachievable paradise on earth, where it could be fact-checked, instead of in heaven, where it could not.  The new religion came complete with its own morality and its own good, the proletariat, and evil, the bourgeoisie.  Speaking in terms of human nature, the bourgeoisie became an outgroup, and the system associated with it, capitalism, anathema.  Thus, it was possible, even for a man as brilliant as Orwell, to seriously maintain that the British democracy and Nazism were really just manifestations of the same evil, capitalism, and therefore as equivalent to each other as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.   This explains another remarkable phenomenon of the time; the willingness of so many seemingly sober economists, politicians, and other miscellaneous intellectuals to liquidate an entire economic system in favor of the gaudy, pie-in-the-sky theories of socialism.  By so doing, one was not merely conducting a somewhat risky economic experiment.  One was fighting evil incarnate.  Self-delusion has always been a prominent characteristic of religious zealots, and the secular religious zealots of the 1930′s were no different.

Well, the experiment has been done, the facts have been checked, and, just as Sir James MacKintosh predicted over 150 years ago, the great Communist myth evaporated like a soap bubble.  Islam, a more traditional religion, rushed in to fill the vacuum left by its demise, inspiring a grotesque love affair between the obscurantist zealots of the old faith and the former “progressive” zealots of the secular faith that had just died.  Meanwhile, these “progressives” have begun assiduously cobbling on the outlines of a new secular faith.  The most recent versions come with a new, if somewhat hackneyed and moth-eaten, morality, including a new ”good” (the 99 percent), and a new “evil” (the corporations).  We would do well to step back and consider whether we really want to go there again, before another country kills off the lion’s share of the intellectual cream of its population by way of eliminating the evil one percent.

George Orwell and Socialism

With Animal Farm, an allegorical tale of the Russian Revolution, and 1984, a fictional analysis of the totalitarian state, George Orwell may well have done more to smash Marxist ideology than any other writer before or since.  He is considered by many the great nemesis of socialism.  As it happens, he was a convinced socialist himself.  Anyone doubting the fact need only read Homage to Catalonia, a memoir of his service in the Spanish Civil War.  If he ever felt any sympathy for the Stalinist variant of the totalitarian state, that experience cured him of it.  Not so his dedication to the socialist idea.  Orwell was, in fact, a revolutionary socialist.  For example, during World War II he wrote,

The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new men, new ideas – in the true sense of the word, a revolution.

(Writing in 1940) The English revolution started several years ago, and it began to gather momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk. Like all else in England, it happens in a sleepy, unwilling way, but it is happening. The war has speeded it up, but it has also increased, and desperately, the necessity for speed. …since a classless, ownerless society is generally spoken of as “Socialism”, we can give that name to the society towards which we are now moving. The war and the revolution are inseparable. We cannot establish anything that a western nation would regard as Socialism without defeating Hitler; on the other hand we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain economically and socially in the nineteenth century. The past is fighting the future and we have two years, a year, possibly only a few months, to see to it that the future wins.

We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war. …The fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook word into a realizable policy. The inefficiency of private capitalism has been proved all over Europe. Its injustice has been proved in the East End of London. …If it can be made clear that defeating Hitler means wiping out class privilege, the great mass of middling people, …will probably be on our side.

From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State is themselves.

One can predict the future in the form of an “either-or”: either we introduce Socialism, or we lose the war. (Published November, 1942)

and so on.  One can find much more in the same vein in Orwell’s writings. In retrospect, it all seems a bit delusional, but Orwell was no fool. He was a surpassingly brilliant man, with a deep respect for the truth. He was no ideologue, and his analyses of the great events happening around him were often remarkably accurate and profound. If anything, his example should teach us humility. If one of the greatest thinkers our species has ever produced could have been so wide of the mark in his predictions of things to come, it might behoove us to be somewhat reticent about attempting the same thing ourselves. Black swans have a habit of turning up at embarrassing times.

For that matter, Orwell was hardly an anomaly in the first half of the twentieth century.  A great number of intellectuals accepted it almost as a commonplace that socialism in some form was not only desirable, but inevitable.  Many agreed with Maxim Gorky’s conclusion that democracy and socialism were inseparable.  One could not exist without the other.  The hard times of the 1930′s seemed to sweep away any lingering doubts that the capitalist system was at the end of its tether.  The stampede to socialism was hardly just a European phenomenon.  Anyone doubting that thinkers in the United States were just as susceptible to the collective delusion need only visit the stacks of a university library and look through the pages of such intellectual and political journals as the Nation, The New Republic, and the American Mercury for the year 1934.  Orwell was merely one of many who saw the “obvious”:  the demise of capitalism was coming sooner rather than later.  The only question left was how to manage the transition to socialism as elegantly as possible.

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, we now know that capitalism was rather more tenacious than Orwell and the rest suspected.  However, we would do well not to become too complacent.  Technological developments like the Internet greatly enhance our access to all kinds of information, but they also tend to reinforce groupthink on both the left and the right with a power that is exponentially greater than the pamphlets and journals of the 1930′s.  Our own collective delusions about the future of mankind will likely seem even more quaint half a century hence.

Orwell’s classless society may have been the stuff of dreams, but several regimes have come and gone since his death that came close to realizing the nightmare world of 1984.  As we shall see, he was remarkably prescient about a good number of other things as well.

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

Of Statistical Mirages and Public Employee Compensation in Wisconsin

It has never been advisable to take the statistics thrown out in the heat of political battles other than with a grain of salt.  As the old saying goes, “Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.”  There are many ways to slip in the lie.  For example, one can introduce variations in the way that common terms are understood, or compare apples and oranges, or simply imply that facts have a significance that lacks any reasonable justification.  The battle between the Left and Right in Wisconsin over public unions has generated some interesting examples. 

One of the most egregious comes from the left, although the right is hardly without sin in these matters.  Specifically, Ezra Klein of Journolist fame is citing a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) that purportedly “proves” that Wisconsin public workers are actually under-compensated compared to their counterparts in the private sector.  The basis for his claim is a nice graph included in the study comparing public and private sector compensation as a function of educational attainment.  In all these comparisons except at the high school level, the public sector workers seem to be taking a huge hit, amounting to a deficit of anywhere from a quarter to a third compared to the private sector.  However, Ezra’s post quotes a couple of paragraphs from the EPI source document citing some caveats regarding this rather striking graph.  For example, at the very end of the quote, which appears in somewhat finer print than the bulk of the post, we learn that,

Controlling for a larger range of earnings predictors—including not just education but also age, experience, gender, race, etc., Wisconsin public-sector workers face an annual compensation penalty of 11%. Adjusting for the slightly fewer hours worked per week on average, these public workers still face a compensation penalty of 5% for choosing to work in the public sector.

There is no explanation of why these controls weren’t factored in when the bar graph referred to above, which seems to show that public sector workers make a much greater sacrifice in order to serve the people of Wisconsin, was created.  It happens that one can find some possible reasons for the discrepancy if one “Googles” the EPI.  It turns out that Ezra somehow forgot to mention that the organization describes itself as “non-partisan but progressive.”  For those who happen not to be astute followers of US politics, those who deem themselves “progressives” are rather more likely to be found on the side of the public sector workers than the Republican party in Wisconsin.   Ezra also forgot to mention that the source of a big chunk of the EPI’s funding is unions.  Perhaps he thought it was too insignificant to mention.

The cost to the state of public pensions is, of course, one of the major bones of contention between Wisconsin governor Walker and the public sector unions.  It would, therefore, seem a matter of some importance to calculate this cost with some rigor, and to explicitly document the method used in any document citing that cost.  Unfortunately, the EPI source document does not do so.  It merely states that,

Retirement benefits account for 8% of state and local government compensation costs compared with 2.5% to 4.9% in the private sector.

It is unfortunate that the details of the method used to arrive at this 8% figure are not described.  It seems rather dubious on the face of it.  For example, Wisconsin teachers who retire after 30 years service will draw 48% of their top pay in pension for the rest of their lives.  It would seem plausible to assume that “top pay” is rather larger than “average pay.”  A teacher hired at the age of 25 would reach retirement age at 55.  At this age, the average life expectancy for US males is about 25 years, and for females about 28.  Any way you figure it, the cost of providing a pension of 48% of top pay for over a quarter of a century dwarfs the 8% figure cited by EPI.  Throw in the fact that this figure does not include retiree health and other non-cash benefits, and the discrepancy gapes even wider.  On the other hand, the average teacher will likely work for less than the required 30 years.  The EPI article does not mention how these and other seemingly salient factors are included in the data.  Apparently, its figure is based on the amount of money the state is currently setting aside to fund the pensions, a wildly inaccurate metric for determining what they will eventually actually cost.  Given that the organization is anything but an unbiased third party, this would seem to be a rather prominent red flag to anyone tempted to cite them as a source.

In a word, dear reader, to credit statistics thrown out by ideologues is to skate on thin ice.  Their main value lies in pointing the way to source material.  Should you really be so bold as to seek to isolate a small fragment of something as evanescent as the truth, you will have to endure the tedious task of sifting through a great deal of that source material on your own.

1848 in the Middle East

Ever since the fall of Louis Philippe’s July Monarchy set off a round of sympathetic insurrections in Europe, revolutions have tended to appear in waves.  The recent uprisings in the Middle East are no exception.  The reaction to them among liberals and conservatives will be familiar to anyone who experienced the cold war.  In those days, conservatives tended to support “anti-Communist” dictators against popular uprisings, and liberals tended to support the “democratic movements” against these “corrupt dictators,” even if their leaders happened to be Pol Pot or Ho chi Minh.  Now, thanks to the Internet and other modern means of spreading the word, the related narratives on the left and right are similar, but more uniform, pervasive, and predictable than ever. 

In the case of Egypt, for example, conservatives seldom write anything concerning recent events there without raising the specter of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Liberals, on the other hand, are cheering on the insurgency, scoffing at the suggestion that it could ever be hijacked by Islamist radicals.  For the most part, the proponents of the two narratives possess little or no reliable information on the balance of political forces in Egypt, and certainly not enough to support the level of certainty with which they represent their points of view.  As with earlier revolutions, the notion that even the best informed human beings are sufficiently intelligent to reliably predict the eventual outcome is merely another one of our pleasant delusions. 

In fact, the belief of the vast majority of those on either side of the issue that the point of view they support with such zeal was arrived at independently via the exercise of their own intellectual powers is also a delusion.  The utter sameness of these “independent opinions,” as like to each other as so many peas in a pod, and their almost inevitable association with an assortment of other “independent opinions” of like nature, demonstrate their real character as ideological shibboleths that define the current intellectual territory of the in-groups of the left and the right. 

What, then, of Egypt?  Who can say?  The political history of the Middle East, the rarity and evanescence of democratic governments in the region, the traditional role of the military as a quasi-political party holding all the trump cards, and the lack of experience in or ideological attachment to popular government do not encourage optimism that a modern democratic government will emerge from the current chaos.  Still, as noted above, none of us has the intellectual horsepower to predict with certainty what will happen, although of all the guesses being made, some of them will surely be lucky.  One can only suggest to the Egyptian people that, given the outcome of some of the other “popular movements” that were greeted with similar euphoria during the past century, it would behoove them to be very careful whom they allow to lead them.

Communism and the Lessons of History

There is nothing more important for us to learn and understand than our own nature. Human nature, by which I mean our innate behavioral traits, does not determine human history, but it constrains it. Anyone aware of those fundamentally emotional traits, related although certainly not identical versions of which exist in many other animals, would have realized that Communism was a non-starter. The Communists and their intellectual fellow travelers fondly believed that their noble experiment would be immune from such hard-wired features of our mental equipment as ingroup-outgroup behavior and the inevitable competition for status and power in human groups, whether they be political parties, “classes,” or social clubs. It was not. As E. O. Wilson so accurately observed concerning Communism, “Great theory, wrong species.”

Communism was a costly experiment. In the attempt to apply it, countries like Russia and Cambodia virtually decapitated themselves. Given its cost, it would behoove us to learn from it. I see very little happening along those lines. The whole phenomenon is fading from living memory, and the historical facts relating to its spectacular rise to prominence as the greatest secular religion of all time, its brutal and bloody reality, and its eventual collapse are all becoming dim as they recede into the mists of time. I can think of no history that it would be more important for our children to learn, but I doubt that more than one in a hundred of our high school students knows who Lenin actually was, let alone the basic tenets of Marxist philosophy.

One lesson we should surely learn is humility. We are not really an intelligent species. We are just smarter than the rest. Our powers of self-delusion are, nevertheless, phenomenal. In the wake of the Great Depression, a whole generation of some of the best and brightest intellectuals among us managed to bamboozle themselves, in spite of copious evidence to the contrary existing at the time, into believing that Communism was both humane and the inevitable future of mankind. Read the pages of such journals as The New Republic, the Nation, and the American Mercury after H. L. Mencken turned over the editorship to Charles Angoff, and you’ll see what I mean. There were certainly a few more sober heads among them, but many of the most prominent political thinkers were cocksure that the Depression proved beyond any reasonable doubt that capitalism had reached a dead end, and the only remaining question regarding the transition to socialism was how it would occur. There are countless examples of this mindset, well known to anyone familiar with the history of the time. One of the more obscure but illustrative examples was published in 1933 by Elias Tobenkin in his book, Stalin’s Ladder. Here are some vignettes from that work:

(The criminologist) leaves the Soviet Union with a heartening sense of having witnessed something new under the sun. Soviet prisons and the Soviet penal system open a novel and inspiring chapter in the relations between society and the criminal. Soviet Russia is successfully coping with the age-old problem of crime and punishment on the basis of a complete transformation of prison life and a complete reversal of the old attitude of vindictiveness toward the individual offender.

With the antiquated prison system there went by the board the practices of corporal punishment, of solitary confinement and of the “iron bags” – the vault-like individual cells that gave the Czarist prisons their stark appellation of the “House of the Dead.”

The conception of punishment, of revenge upon the criminal has been outlawed. In a decree issued in March, 1919, the Communist party ordered the country’s prisons to be transformed into educational institutions. Confinement in such an institution was declared to be an “economic corrective,” for the purpose of educating the offender “in the discipline common to all workers.”

The prisoner has his whole life recut and reshaped during his period of confinement. He gets a complete overhauling physically, mentally, and psychically. His emotions are drained of past bitterness and disappointments and attuned to a course of labor and peace with his fellows, with the world.

…and much more of the same. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind were yet to appear, but there were already many published accounts available of the reality of the Soviet forced labor camps by lesser known authors with firsthand knowledge at the time Tobenkin was writing his book.  They were ignored by those who should have known better, swamped by a vast wave of confirmation bias, and trivialized by phrases like, “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”

It’s easy to gain a sense of intellectual hubris in reading the countless similar examples of delusional self-deception published at the time by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, not to mention such lesser intellectual lights as Tobenkin. We would do well to resist the urge. In matters touching the Soviet prison system we have the familiar advantage of Monday morning quarterbacks. Not so concerning the political and intellectual controversies of our own day. The true believers in the political narratives of the left and the right are just as cocksure they have a monopoly on the truth as ever the likes of Shaw or Wells were in their own day. History is likely to prove them just as delusional.

The truth is elusive to minds as limited as ours. It is best to retain a due sense of intellectual humility, and refrain from wandering too far from the domain of repeatable experiments into the realm of unfalsifiable speculation. Otherwise we are just so many Tobenkins waiting to happen.

The Politics of Genetic Determinism

Another article has just appeared on the website of the journal Evolutionary Psychology relating to the influence of our innate mental wiring on the likelihood that our political outlook will be conservative or liberal. Entitled, “Extending the Behavioral Immune System to Political Psychology: Are Political Conservatism and Disgust Sensitivity Really Related?” it isn’t fundamentally different from other papers that have appeared in behavioral science journals recently exploring the same theme.

The conjecture that human beings have an innate tendency to identify with ideological points of view that are either to the right or the left of the political spectrum has been around for a very long time, and recent research seems to verify it. However, such work must necessarily be carried out in the context of human societies charged with the types of emotion it seeks to study. It is hardly as irrelevant to those emotions as, say, research into the behavior of some new type of amoeba. It should come as no surprise if the results of such studies are crudely distorted and transmogrified into propaganda weapons by one ideological faction or the other.

Specifically, there is a danger that research in this area will be trivialized to “prove” determinist arguments the same way other research into innate aspects of human behavior has been used in the legal system to claim that criminals are not responsible for their behavior because “their genes made them do it.” An example of what I’m talking about turned up on the Foxnews website today. Referring to a different but related study, it carries the headline, “Researchers find the ‘Liberal Gene’”. This is immediately followed by the byline, “Don’t hold liberals responsible for their opinion – they can’t help themselves.” The rest of the piece is considerably more nuanced. For example, a bit further down we read,

“The way openness is measured, it’s really about receptivity to different lifestyles, for example, or different norms or customs,” he (research paper author James Fowler) told FoxNews.com. “We hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences [a measure of openness] will tend to be more liberal” — but only if they had a number of friends when growing up, Fowler cautioned.

This isn’t a typical gene association study,” he said. “There’s a combination of genes and environment that matter.”

No matter, as all good propagandists and students of the media are aware, a great number, if not most, readers never look beyond the headline and the byline. That’s where you should always look if you want to get the “message” straight up. That “message” is set forth a great deal more explicitly in an “opinion” piece that is linked directly under the main article entitled, “A ‘Liberal Gene’ You Say — Now That Explains It All, Doesn’t It?” The author, Martin Sieff, quickly hammers the nuanced scientific observations of the original article into a handy propaganda tool:

Can there really be a liberal gene? They’ve got to be joking.

But no here it is, straight from Fox News today: James Fowler, a professor medical genetics and political science (cool combination) says liberals can’t help being – liberal.

Sieff goes on to “rearrange” the research paper to suit his own political point of view:

Of course, what Fowler calls the “liberal gene” he also explains as being the “open minded” gene. And that might well apply to modern conservatives instead of liberals, because which of them is more open-minded?

After all, Fowler defines his “liberals” as being open minded and open to new ideas and new solutions. But does that fit modern American liberals, who stick to disastrous failed ideas and policies in the face of all the evidence? Or does it apply to American conservatives, who are right now thrashing out a redefinition of conservative policies for the new century?

So perhaps Fowler’s “liberals” were really open-minded conservatives all alike, and his “liberals”, while certainly not conservative, were just rigid, closed minded defenders of a disastrous, failed status quo all along.

The deterministic message is again served up straight in the “zinger” lines at the end of the article:

This means of course, that conservatives should show more tolerance the next time they hear President Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. After all, they can’t help it, can they?

It also means that so-called principled liberals, like Obama, are far more likely to run the country into the ground than cynical opportunists like President Bill Clinton did. Obama and Pelosi, by contrast are what they are, and they always will be. Not even national ruin will change them.

My intention here is not to single out conservatives for criticism. Leftists can and will bowdlerize exactly the same research papers to create deterministic mythologies supporting their own points of view. In the process they will be just as adept as conservatives in transmuting nuanced predispositions into rigid instincts.   In fact, there is no single gene that determines an individual’s political point of view, nor is environment irrelevant to shaping that point of view, nor are our highly developed rational minds incapable of overriding ideological predispositions. Perhaps more importantly, the degree to which ideas are true or false is not altered by the degree to which they fall on one side or the other of the political spectrum. Researchers might do well to lay more stress on these facts in their research papers, and at the same time bear in mind the fact that they are not immune to the emotional behavior they are studying themselves.

Morality and the Metamorphosis of Secular Religion

Secular religions have taken the place of spiritual ones among many “progressive” intellectuals.  As I noted in an earlier post, they are distinguishable by an irrational belief in a disembodied “Good” as opposed to a more traditional “God.”  Communism was the quintessential example of such a religion, but there are many other variants, just as there are many Christian sects. 

There are many similarities between the true believers of both types of faith.  For example, pathologically pious secular zealots imagine themselves as saviors of mankind in this world, just as their spiritual brethren imagine themselves as saviors of souls in the next world.  Armed with an invincible faith in their intellectual superiority over other mortals, they would guide the rest of us benighted souls who would really prefer that they just leave us alone to a brave new world of “human flourishing,” just as earlier zealots felt duty-bound to herd us all towards the pearly gates. 

For many years, Communism was the most viral and toxic variant of either type of religion on the planet.  Since its demise, that honor has passed to radical Islam.  As Eric Hofer noted in “The True Believer,” there are remarkable psychological similarities among the zealots of all faiths, regardless of the particular dogmas that inspire them.  His observations have been abundantly confirmed in recent years, as “progressive” true believers, left high and dry by the collapse of Communism, have begun a counter-intuitive flirting with radical Islam like so many moths fascinated by a candle.  For them it represents, in a sense, the only game in town.

Secular religions are as vulnerable to the advance of human knowledge as the spiritual ones.  Fanatics of both types have a similar allergic reaction to the truth if it happens to challenge their dogmas.  For the secular faithful, one such dogma has long been the perfectibility of human beings, dependent on a belief that human behavioral traits are almost infinitely malleable.  Hypotheses to the effect that our behavior, including our moral behavior, is actually profoundly influenced by innate predispositions hard-wired in our brains flew in the face of this aspect of the secular narrative.  The faithful reacted furiously to such ideas, resisting them in the teeth of more than abundant confirming evidence until, in recent years, the weight of evidence became overwhelming.  Their intuitions were right; they had good reason to do so.

In fact, acceptance of innate behavior has been every bit as devastating to irrational belief in “The Good” as Darwin’s great theory was to irrational belief in God.  With respect to moral behavior, in particular, increasingly frequent and spectacular demonstrations of the physical and chemical basis of the associated emotions, the locations of their origins in the brain down to the level of neurons, and the precise bits of our genome that give rise to them, as well as the observation of analogous moral behavior in animals, have made it abundantly obvious that “The Good” is an artifact of moral emotions similar to those in other species, unremarkable except for the fact that they are experienced and cognitively interpreted in the minds of creatures of exceptionally high intelligence.  Our perception of “The Good” is entirely dependent for its existence on evolved traits that were added to our repertoire because, at various times in the distant past with no resemblance to the present, they happened to promote our survival.  As such, it cannot exist as a thing in itself, independent of individual human minds. 

Our moral emotions have and will continue to have an undeniable psychological power over virtually every one of us.  However, we have now learned much about the nature of those emotions, the causes that give rise to them in the brain, and the evolutionary nature of their origins.  It is no longer plausible or rational to claim that they have any transcendental significance as objective things independent of and existing for reasons unrelated to those origins.  That does not mean that the dogmas of secular religions will cease to exist.  It does mean that belief in those dogmas is no longer compatible with scientific fact or reason.  As a result, it will become increasingly necessary for secular true believers to defend them as spiritual true believers have done in the past; with obscurantism.

As noted in earlier posts, we have already begun to see this in the case of the “blank slate.”  The true believers have been forced to abandon it, at least in its most absurd incarnations, but have created a whole new narrative to replace it.  For example, the most brilliant, influential and articulate opponents of the “blank slate” in the 60s and 70s pointed out that there were negative aspects of innate human behavior that we would do well to understand if we were to have any hope of avoiding the endless repetition of warfare, violence, and mayhem in human history.  These are aspects of human behavior that are distinctly out of tune with the latest secular narrative.  As a result, regardless of the fact that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey were right and their opponents were wrong regarding one issue of overarching significance they were debating, the hypothesis of innate behavior, they are studiously ignored by modern secular zealots.  It is as if they never existed or, if they did, their ideas could be dismissed with a wave of the hand as “utterly and totally wrong.”  We are assured that “The Good” can still be achieved if we are just a bit more judicious about “adjusting the knobs” of our moral behavior, ushering in a wonderful new era of “human flourishing” in spite of the abundance of historical disasters associated with such noble plans, and their increasingly obvious disconnect with reality.  In the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, “The Good,” lives on, an independent, objective thing dangling out there in never-never land.

The “proofs” offered up for the existence of “The Good” by the priests of secular religions yield nothing to the miscellaneous “proofs” of the existence of God devised over the years for their unabashed rejection of intellectual clarity and common sense.  Here’s an example taken from true believer Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”:

But just because our brains are prepared to think in certain ways, it does not follow that the objects of those thoughts are fictitious. Many of our faculties evolved to mesh with real entities in the world. Our perception of depth is the product of complicated circuitry in the brain, circuitry that is absent from other species. But that does not mean that there aren’t real trees and cliffs out there, or that the world is as flat as a pancake. And so it may be with more abstract entities. humans, like many animals, appear to have an innate sense of number, which can be explained by the advantages of reasoning about numerosity during our evolutionary history. (For example, if three bears go into a cave and two come out, is it safe to enter?) But the mere fact that a number faculty evolved does not mean that numbers are hallucinations. According to the Platonist conception of number favored by many mathematicians and philosophers, entities such as numbers and shapes have an existence independent of minds. The number three is not invented out of whole cloth; it has real properties that can be discovered and explored. No rational creature equipped with circuitry to understand the concept “two” and the concept of addition could discover that two plus one equals anything other than three. That is why we expect similar bodies of mathematical results to emerge from different cultures or even different planets. If so, the number sense evolved to grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that grasp them.

Perhaps the same argument can be made for morality. According to the theory of moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that licenses some moral arguments and not others.

Voila!  “The Good” ascends triumphant from its humble origin.  Like Pinocchio, it sheds its subjective strings and dances about before our noses, a real, honest-to-goodness thing-in-itself.  Let this serve as a lesson to you, dear reader.  Never let a secular religious zealot draw you into a conversation about the real existence of the number two.

Meanwhile, the Brave New World beckons!  A manifesto has just been released by attendees at the recent Edge Conference on “The New Science of Morality.”  Referred to by its signatories as a “Consensus Statement,” it includes eight sections, the first seven of which are a brief summary of what passes as the state-of-the-art in our scientific understanding of morality.  However, the eighth is a somewhat diffident incarnation of the latest version of the holy scriptures:

Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying degrees

The emergence of morality allowed much larger groups of people to live together and reap the benefits of trust, trade, shared security, long term planning, and a variety of other non-zero-sum interactions. Some moral systems do this better than others, and therefore it is possible to make some comparative judgments.

The existence of moral diversity as an empirical fact does not support an “anything-goes” version of moral relativism in which all moral systems must be judged to be equally good. We note, however, that moral evaluations across cultures must be made cautiously because there are multiple justifiable visions of flourishing and wellbeing, even within Western societies. Furthermore, because of the power of moral intuitions to influence reasoning, social scientists studying morality are at risk of being biased by their own culturally shaped values and desires.

It’s not quite as self-assured as something that, say, Calvin or Jonathan Edwards might have written, but you get the drift.  I’m sorry, dear reader, but it won’t help to suggest to these people that we might all “flourish” better if religious zealots, whether secular or spiritual, would refrain from foisting their dogmas on the rest of us.  The pathologically pious have ye always with you.  We’ve already had an abundant taste of how earlier versions of their sure-fire nostrums worked with Nazism, Communism, the Holy Inquisition, and a host of others.  Let us take heed, lest, sharing the fate of the millions of victims of earlier versions of “The Good” in the 20th century, the next time we “flourish” becomes our last.

Of “Eco-Fascism” and Tea Parties

The 10:10 Campaign is an effort by British environmentalists to get businesses and individuals to cut their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010.  Recently the organization released (and then quickly withdrew) a remarkably self-destructive video in which 10:10 promoters murdered anyone (including children) who refused to go along by pressing a button that caused them to explode, spraying blood and gore on those around them.  In an incredibly lame apology, the producers said this was intended to be “funny.”

Opponents of environmental activism on the right quickly seized on the incident to tar the entire movement with the same brush (for example, here, here, and here), suggesting that all environmentalists either are or sympathize with extremists whose tastes run to homicidal “humor” about blowing up their opponents.

In a sense, the left has been hoisted on its own petard. They have been desperately casting about for “evidence” that the Tea Party Movement is “extremist,” seizing on the flimsiest incidents to “prove” that it is racist, bigoted, violent, etc. For example, when a few local activists put up a sign equating Obama with the likes of Hitler and Stalin, they immediately worked themselves into a fine lather, shouting down their anathemas on a loose organization with tens of millions of supporters as if every one of them had collaborated in putting up the sign (see, for example, here and here).  I especially liked the BBC’s “objective” report about the incident, which had the lurid headline “Tea Party fund sign linking Obama to Hitler,” along with plausible denial that they were taking sides in the form of the usual “he said, she said” stuff buried in the body of the article.  Classic!

Conservatives have rightly objected to the left’s “extremist” propaganda narrative, noting the studied silence from those quarters when the “extremists” turn out to be provocateurs. Now, however, they are using the same tactics, implying the collective guilt of tens of millions of people who happen to disagree with them because of the ill-considered acts of a few.  It’s certainly understandable in terms of human nature, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

Steven Pinker, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and the Blank Slate

Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a wonderful book. It documents the hijacking of the behavioral sciences by dogmatic ideologues with a reckless disregard for the truth.  They established an oppressive orthodoxy that sought, not to debate its opponents, but to vilify and silence them. Pinker reviews the origins and development of their extreme “nurture versus nature” narrative, the political and ideological dogmas that inspired it, and presents a treasure trove of scientific evidence debunking those dogmas. Anyone who respects the truth and values the freedom of human thought owes him a debt of gratitude for what is, by and large, a masterful work. It is, however, not without its flaws and, uncharitable as it may seem, I will seek to point some of them out.

Perhaps the greatest is Pinker’s acceptance of the “big bang” myth of the demise of blank slate orthodoxy, according to which it began with the “seminal” books of E. O. Wilson, starting with Sociobiology, followed by On Human Nature. In fact, with all due respect to Wilson, a brilliant thinker whom I deeply admire, there was nothing significant about either book that was not old hat by the time they were published. Both of them suggested that innate traits had evolved in humans as well as other species that significantly affected our behavior. That hypothesis had been suggested by many other thinkers before Wilson, and Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey and others had presented copious evidence that it was true at least 15 years before the publication of Sociobiology. By the time Sociobiology appeared, the evidence for innate human behavior, obvious enough to everyone but philosophers since ancient times, had become sufficiently compelling to leave no doubt that the hypothesis was correct in the minds of anyone who had not shut themselves off from the truth in an ideological strait jacket.

Ardrey, in particular, had a remarkable influence on his times, especially in the educated lay community, with books like African Genesis (1961), The Territorial Imperative (1966), and The Social Contract (1970). All of these books convincingly debunked the very same ideologues that Pinker spends so much time refuting in The Blank Slate, and all elicited the same blind fury from the ideologues that he so deplores. Lorenz, co-winner of a Nobel Prize in 1973, presented similar ideas in On Aggression (1966), and had the honor of being vilified and ridiculed with Ardrey in Man and Aggression (1968), a collection of essays edited by blank slate high priest Ashley Montagu. Unfortunately, Lorenz couldn’t resist occasionally falling into the obscure style of German philosophers, a weakness particularly evident in Behind the Mirror (1973), a factor that weakened the impact of his popular science books.

Both Ardrey and Lorenz shared the same fundamental ideas: That innate genetic traits have a significant effect on human behavior, that our genetic programming could manifest itself in “good” ways, but also in destructive behavior such as aggression, and that it was essential to learn the truth about our nature in order to control the darker aspects of it so as to avoid self-destruction. In those most significant and fundamental aspects of their thought, they were right and the orthodox community of experts were wrong. They might have forgiven Lorenz, because he was one of their own tribe, but he was joined at the hip with Ardrey. Ardrey was an outsider, an upstart, and they could never forgive him for shaming them. He became, and remains, an unperson.

It is all the more remarkable that the two most influential opponents of the blank slate in the 60′s and early 70′s should be virtually absent from a book entitled “The Blank Slate.” The ideologues may be in retreat, but their anathema still stands, and Pinker still obeys the interdict of his tribe.  A new narrative has arisen to replace the old. Lorenz and Ardrey are absent from the copious list of references at the end of the book. The only mention of Ardrey is on page 124. Here is what Pinker has to say:

The Noble Savage, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been “strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies.” I looked up these “studies,” which were collected in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.”)

And thus, with a wave of the hand, Pinker dismisses the two most influential opponents of the blank slate in the heyday of blank slate orthodoxy, and the ideological blinkers of his tribe slam into place. It is hard to believe that he has ever actually read any of the books of Ardrey or Lorenz, or even took more than a superficial glance at Man and Aggression, for that matter. If he had, he might have noticed that the blank slate essayists themselves did not share his condescending attitude. For example, from Geoffrey Gorer’s “Ardrey on Human Nature:”

Almost without question, Robert Ardrey is today the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature, and the most skilled populariser of the findings of paleo-anthropologists, ethologists, and biological experimenters… He is a skilled writer, with a lively command of English prose, a pretty turn of wit, and a dramatist’s skill in exposition; he is also a good reporter, with the reporter’s eye for the significant detail, the striking visual impression. He has taken a look at nearly all the current work in Africa of paleo-anthropologists and ethologists; time and again, a couple of his paragraphs can make vivid a site, such as the Olduvai Gorge, which has been merely a name in a hundred articles.

…he does not distort his authorities beyond what is inevitable in any selection and condensation… even those familiar with most of the literature are likely to find descriptions of research they had hitherto ignored, particularly in The Territorial Imperative, with its bibliography of 245 items.

If he had even taken the time to read the first page of Montagu’s introduction, Pinker would have noticed that William Golding was not somehow treated as a co-equal of Ardrey and Lorenz, nor was he of any significance as far as the book is concerned except as a red herring thrown out in a couple of the essays. When I saw the bit about “hydraulic pressure,” I wondered what on earth Pinker was going on about. It turns out that it was a hypothetical afterthought Lorenz tacked onto one of his theories of animal behavior some time after he had introduced it. To the best of my knowledge, Ardrey never mentioned it, and the idea that it played any kind of a significant role in the thought of either man or was somehow essential to their rejection of the blank slate or any of their other significant ideas is completely absurd. It’s as if Pinker were casually dismissing the contribution of Niels Bohr to physics because some aspects of his atomic model weren’t entirely accurate. As far as the notion that “evolution acts for the good of the species” is concerned, I can only surmise that Pinker took one of Ardrey’s more colorful phrases out of context. Both men’s view of evolution was entirely sober and orthodox. Again, if their ideas on the subject are somehow in conflict with some detail of the latest nuances of evolutionary theory, that is hardly a reason to dismiss their life’s work with contempt. Is the fact that Dawkins happened to throw a temper tantrum in The Selfish Gene and declare “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong,” supposed to constitute a reasonable argument against them?  “Totally and utterly wrong” about what?  The whole point of the books was that innate behavior is real and the blank slate is wrong.  Does Pinker disagree?  Then why did he bother to write his book?   Has Dawkins now become as infallible as the pope, so that we’re forced to take him at his word and must use him as an authority, even if he utters blockheaded phrases like that?  Here are some of the things Ardrey actually wrote in African Genesis in 1961:

Man is a fraction of the animal world… We are not so unique as we should like to believe.

The problem of man’s original nature imposes itself upon any human solution.

Amity – as Darwin guessed but did not explore – is as much a product of evolutionary forces as contest and enmity. In the evolution of any social species including the human, natural selection places as heavy a penalty on failure in peace as failure in battle.

A certain justification has existed until now, in my opinion, for submission of the insurgent specialists to the censorship of scientific orthodoxy. Such higher bastions of philosophical orthodoxy as Jefferson, Marx, and Freud could scarcely be stormed by partial regiments. Until the anti-romantic (anti-blank slate) revolution could summon to arms what now exists, an overwhelming body of incontrovertible proof, then action had best be confined to a labyrinthine underground of unreadable journals, of museum back rooms, and of gossiping groups around African camp-fires.

If today we say that almost nothing is known about the much-observed chimpanzee, then what we mean is that almost nothing is known of his behavior in a state of nature.

The romantic fallacy (blank slate) may be defined as the central conviction of modern thought that all human behavior, with certain clearly stated exception, results from causes lying within the human experience… Contemporary thought may diverge wildly in it prescriptions for human salvation; but it stands firmly united in its systematic error.

“God made all things good,” wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Man meddles with them and they become evil.” …Stated so baldly, the Illusion of Original Goodness may bring a shudder to the contemporary spirit. But from Rousseau’s proposition a host of conclusions, all logical, all magical, came into being; that babies are born good; that in innoccence resides virtue; that primitive people retain a morality which civilized people tend to lose;

The contemporary revolution in the natural sciences points inexorably to the proposition that man’s soul is not unique. Man’s nature, like his body, is the product of evolution.

Marxian socialism represents the most stunning and cataclysmic triumph of the romantic fallacy over the minds of rational men… And an observer of the animal role in human affairs can only suggest that much of what we have experienced in the last terrifying half-century has been simply what happens, no more and no less, when human energies become preoccupied with the building of social institutions upon false assumptions concerning man’s inner nature.

It is the superb paradox of our time that in a single century we have proceeded from the first iron-clad warship to the first hydrogen bomb, and from the first telegraphic communication to the beginnings of the conquest of space; yet in the understanding of our own natures, we have proceeded almost nowhere.

Sound familiar?  It should if you’ve read Pinker.  Much of what Ardrey wrote about the “romantic fallacy” might have been taken directly from the pages of The Blank Slate.  Notice anything about an “archaic hydraulic theory?”  Neither did I.  Does any of the above seem “totally and utterly wrong?”  It doesn’t to me, either, nor does it to Pinker if we can believe what he wrote in his own book.

In a word, the narrative hasn’t died. It’s just assumed a new guise. Forget Pinker’s red herrings about “hydraulic theories.” The essential facts are that Ardrey and Lorenz defended the idea of innate behavior, and their opponents dismissed it. They got it right, and their opponents got it wrong. But Ardrey, you see, was a “mere playwright,” and the expert community could never forgive him for humbling them and for his flagrant lese majeste. It was essential that the truth be vindicated, not by an outsider, but by one of their own ingroup. In may be necessary for successful playwrights to have some expertise in human nature, but Consilience, a word that Pinker mouths repeatedly in his book, can only be carried so far. And so it was that a whole new mythology was created, and E. O. Wilson was anointed as a knight in shining armor who suddenly popped up 15 years after the publication of African Genesis and defeated the blank slate ideologues single-handed.

There are other problems with The Blank Slate, less severe but significant nevertheless. For example, Pinker shares the philosopher’s vice of creating neat Procrustean beds upon which the ideas of our greatest thinkers are distorted to make them fit into tidy patterns. According to such schemes, for example, philosopher A begat philosopher B, philosopher B begat Philosopher C, and philosopher C begat the Blank Slate. These tidy systems peel away the individual worth and integrity of our best minds and bowdlerize them into a simple stew so that pedants can make a pretence of understanding them. Thus a man as brilliant as John Stuart Mill, who had the misfortune to write about the human condition before the revolutionary ideas of Darwin could inform his thought, is reduced in The Blank Slate to a mere precursor of a hidebound ideologue like Ashley Montagu.

I’m sorry if some of my own animosities have surfaced here, but I am only human, too. That which is innate in us includes emotions that make it a matter of no small difficulty to step back and look at ourselves with cold scientific detachment. Pinker deserves our highest praise for The Blank Slate, because, as we press ahead with new discoveries, it is essential that we understand how entire branches of the behavioral sciences could have been so deranged and derailed by ideological dogmas. If the blemishes I imagine in his book are real, they can never serve as a pretext to dismiss his work with a wave of the hand, as he has so casually done to others.