Langurs and Bonobos and Chimps

Bonobos are the new darlings of the noble savage crowd.  They were bitterly disappointed by the rest of the great apes that, as recently as the 1970’s, were all supposed to be peaceful, vegetarian, and inoffensive.  When Jane Goodall and others started actually observing great apes in the wild and, as chronicled in books such as Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males, found that they occasionally displayed a few less endearing traits, such as hunting and eating meat, rape, infanticide, and the use of weapons in violent border warfare and raiding, true believers in the innate “goodness” of mankind demonstrated their own nobility by subjecting the messengers to furious ad hominem attacks.  It didn’t work.  Too many observers were reporting the same thing, and the evidence was too compelling. 

Enter the Bonobo.  They supposedly possess all the “good” traits their close relatives, the chimpanzees, so notably lack.  Occasionally their halo will slip.  For example, they compete for status, just like the other great apes.  Then, too, their hagiographers will occasionally slip up.  I was at a lecture about them once at which the speaker sought to emphasize their “feminist” nature.   It seems the females in bonobo groups tend to form alliances for self-protection, and to maintain decorum among the males.  The speaker recounted how, in one of the groups, an unruly male had attempted some aggressive behavior towards one of the females.  She and her pals ganged up on the evil-doer, giving him a thorough drubbing and, in the words of the speaker, nearly tearing his scrotum completely off.  Feminism was certainly vindicated by the incident, but the bonobo’s supposedly non-violent nature less so.

Be that as it may, apart from a few such rare lapses, bonobos do seem to be a great deal less violent and generally “demonic” than their close relatives, the chimpanzees.  If estimates that they shared a common ancestor as recently as 1.5 to 3 million years ago are correct, it would seem to demonstrate a high degree of flexibility in the evolutionary toolkit pertaining to the innate behavioral traits that characterize humans as well as other animals.  On the other hand, it may be that all these observed traits are subject to greater cultural variation within species that previously imagined.  Perhaps bonobo groups can be more “demonic” than their observed behavior to date would indicate, and chimps have taken a bum rap and are really capable of more placid behavior under the right conditions. 

The inimitable Robert Ardrey drew attention to a few data points to that effect in his The Social Contract, published in 1970.  In Chapter 7 of that book he recounted a series of observations of langurs, a leaf-eating monkey widely distributed in India.  Carried out by different researchers in different locations and environments, they revealed widely divergent information about the “typical behavior” of langurs.   The first, carried out by Phyllis Jay in an area where the creatures are fairly scarce, found that troops of 25 members more or less occupied ranges of about two square miles, and rarely contacted each other.  There appeared to be no defended territories, and no evident boundaries between groups.  A rigid rank order prevailed within the groups, and serious quarrels were almost non-existent.  As Ardrey put it, they

…seemed the ideal, sunny, non-aggressive creatures of legend, and (the) study, completed in the early year of 1959, did much to reinforce the arguments of those primate students that monkeys never fight, never defend territory, never do anything but behave themselves in a fashion rarely glimpsed in human schoolyards. It was a time when we all still said that “langurs are this way.”

Then, however, an account of another study of langurs appeared, carried out this time in Ceylon by Suzanne Ripley.  Again quoting Ardrey,

Troops were of about the same size. But nowhere did there exist those infinite distances for the happy, wandering life. The troop’s two square miles of India’s central forests became an eighth of a square mile in Ceylon. And here there were not only territories, with actively defended, unchanging borders; groups sought combat. (Like chimps! Alas, Ardrey never lived to learn the truth about them or the great apes, universally believed to all be truly peaceful, vegetarian, and inoffensive at the time he wrote his books. If only he had known how thoroughly the subsequent revelations about them vindicated his hypotheses. But I digress.) Like the howler and the callicebus, the langur is a noisy monkey. Morning treetop whoops would bring defiant answers from whooping neighbors and mobilization on the border. Ritualized displays might take place, with vast leaps through the trees. But in these combats between groups true fighting could take place, too, with chasing, wrestling, biting, tail-pulling.

But wait, there’s more.  Yukimara Sugiyama of Kyoto University also went to India to study langurs, this time in the extreme of population density among the three groups, about twice that in the Ceylon study.  What he found was what has been described by others as a “behavioral sink.”  Again quoting Ardrey,

…disorder was quite nearly perfect. There were territories, but borders were obscure and ill-defended. When troops met, leaders fought unassisted. Neither were there the rigid rank orders of dominance so characteristic of Jay’s widely separated groups. Perhaps as a consequence almost all troops had only one adult male, though there might be six or ten adult females. Sugiyama speculated that without a hierarchy regulating the relationships of males, quarrels were so disruptive that only one male usually remained. The expelled males formed their own groups in the forest.

When the sexual season approached its peak, an all-male gang, …would descend on a troop containing females, kill or drive off the leader and any sub-adult males, and fight among themselves for sexual sovereignty. Far from mourning their departed overlord, the females would respond to the action with sexual stimulation which brought on an immediate peak of copulation with the conqueror. Infants were neglected. And the episode reached its climax when the conqueror bit to death all young.

Readers of Demonic Males will note the remarkable parallels between Sugiyama’s langurs and the behavior of individual “outsider” male gorillas, which will occasionally raid the troop of a silverback, seeking to kill the infants.  If successful, the mother may follow him as her new overlord! 

But the upshot of the story is that the behavior of a given species of primate can vary widely depending on environmental conditions.  Innate behavior does not imply “deterministic” behavior.  It merely constrains the potential paths it can take.  May not the same phenomena observed among langurs be possible in the great apes?  Given the right conditions, could there be peaceful chimps and violent bonobos?  What about our own species?  Often human populations that have been peaceful for generations have also become incredibly violent in a relatively short time.  Why?  We need to learn.  There is no more important study than the study of our own nature.  Our survival depends on learning who we are.

Indian Langur

The Rime of the Ancient Anarchist

People in the “Not in our Genes” school of human behavior are standing on increasingly thin ice scientifically.  The evidence, which they are generally adept at ignoring, is leaning heavily against them.  They reject hypotheses such as that set forth in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, according to which altruism and other forms of moral behavior exist as evolved traits because they promoted the survival and reproduction of the genes carried by individuals.  They tend to be people with particularly strong moral emotions themselves, and usually lean to the left of the political spectrum.  Scratch one of them, and you will generally find a hidebound ideologue.  Their tastes tend to run to ad hominem attacks on their ideological opponents.  I’ve run across many Marxists among them, who have generally based their rejection on some version of the “Blank Slate,” or nurture versus nature.  Yesterday I came across one of a different color; black not red.  This one, by the name of Steve Davis, is a devotee of Peter Kropotkin, and therefore, presumably, an anarchist.

His rationale for rejecting “the selfish gene,” set forth in an article entitled “Altruism: It’s Evolution, It’s Origin, It’s Discontents,” is quite different from that of the average Marxist, and is worth deconstructing in detail.  It starts with the following:

Life began when complex molecules came together in cooperation, to perform the functions that we now consider to be characteristics of life.

Cooperation therefore preceded evolution. We do not have to look to evolution to explain the origin of cooperation. It undoubtedly underwent further development through evolution when different forms of cooperation came into being, but cooperation as a concept is linked to life itself, not to evolution.

That’s a new one on me.  Thefreedictionary lists one of the definitions of cooperation as “beneficial but inessential interaction between two species in a community,” but I haven’t previously heard it applied in the case of molecules.  Their interactions are described rather well by Schrödinger’s equation, and I can see how the Coulomb force is relevant to the interaction, but don’t really see the point of dragging “cooperation” into it.  Be that as it may, let’s accept Davis’ definition, and agree that when atoms or molecules combine, they are “cooperating.”  Davis continues,

Cooperation is a form of goodness, but how prevalent is it in nature? Well, we see cooperation between molecules, between cells, between organs, between organisms, between groups, and between groups of groups. How much cooperation do we need to see before conceding its significance? How blind do you have to be to ignore cooperation as a factor in evolution? And it’s not hard to see that once cooperation was pulled into the evolutionary process and evolved into different forms, that it’s just one small step to altruism in the accepted meaning of the word, that is, kindness for its own sake. One small step that is, when a particular condition is satisfied.

Really?  A form of goodness?  In what way did the random combination of molecules suddenly become good?  Molecules can also combine to form poisons, or cancer cells.  Is that “good” as well?  We have accepted Davis’ definition of “cooperation,” but how is it that “cooperation” suddenly acquired the quality of “good?”  Atoms and molecules can combine in all kinds of ways, but now Davis has narrowed his definition of “cooperation” without bothering to consult us.  It is now no longer just a random combination of molecules, but a “good” combination of molecules, by which is apparently meant one that will lead to the formation of life.  If so, it begs the question of how the “goodness” was added in.  I submit that it didn’t happen because the molecules wanted to be nice to each other, but because of natural selection.  I have never before heard of a mechanism of natural selection other than via the genetic material carried by individuals.    Davis, however, has an epiphany for us.  It really happens because “cooperation” is “pulled into the evolutionary process.”  Am I being presumptuous in asking the mechanism of that “pull?”  Supposing, however, that the “pull” somehow happened, we learn that it then “evolved into different forms.”  Really?  How did it happen?  What drove the evolution?  According to Davis,

Acts of kindness occur when people (and other animals) see themselves as being part of a greater entity. It is that reality that the advocates for individualism cannot accept. If organisms see themselves as being part of a greater entity, then that’s all that’s needed for group-based trends to appear. And it doesn’t matter what their genes think about it at all!

Now I see!  “Group-based trends appeared” because animals “see themselves as being part of a greater entity.”  It may well be that some humans see themselves as being part of a greater entity, but chimpanzees?  We-e-e-l-l-l, maybe, but according to the latest observations of them in the wild, I have some reservations about the conclusion that they are “cooperative” or “kind” as a result of that world view, even by Davis’ loose definition of the terms.  Moving down the line, do buzzards see themselves as “part of a greater entity?”  What about slime mold?  If so, what is the engine of the “group-based trends?”  Evolution by acquired characteristics, because monkeys really, really want their children to be good?

Enough.  I could go on and on, but it would only become repetitious.  Needless to say, all of this is more akin to mysticism than science.  That’s never been a problem for people like Davis.  If pressed on these matters, they quickly begin striking pious poses, and accuse their opponents of all kinds of moral lapses.  It worked for a long time.  It doesn’t work anymore.  In the end, the truth doesn’t care whether the Davises of the world consider it immoral or not.

Evolutionary Psychology: Do the Psychologists really Get It?

Robert Kurzban has an interesting (and revealing) post at the blog he writes for the journal Evolutionary Psychology.  He cites the following comment that turned up on one of his earlier posts:

The criticism of social scientists for failing to accept an evolutionary explanation for many of the psychological functions they research and teach has been made many many times during the last couple of decades…this criticism usually appears in general terms and without quotations from or citations of published work…Is this criticism now a straw man?

and wonders,

So when didn’t social scientists say that evolutionary psychology was relevant? How would we show, for instance, that they always didn’t accept evolutionary explanations? How can one document being ignored, an act that more or less by definition leaves no traces?

I know! Say what!? That was my reaction, too, but you have to remember this is a relatively young professor speaking. He probably wasn’t even born when Ashley Montagu published Man and Aggression, a whole collection of essays by himself and other luminaries in the social sciences, all saying quite explicitly that what is now called evolutionary psychology was, not only irrelevant, but bunk. When Richard Lewontin published a whole book to that effect, Not in our Genes, in 1985, it is likely Robert ignored it in favor of the far more improving and enlightening comic books available at the time. In a word, he was born too late to experience all the interesting twists and turns relating to the study of human nature during the last half century, and since, to the best of my knowledge at least, no one has ever written a credible history of the relevant events, it’s a “blank slate” (to coin a phrase) as far as he’s concerned.

Alas, I can offer no guidance on how one might document the fact that one is being ignored, but I rather suspect there’s something behind the suspicion.  After all, social scientists were once quite brazen about rejecting any influence of the innate on human behavior, and it stands to reason that they would be somewhat chastened by being put to shame by, among others, a mere playwright by the name of Robert Ardrey.  In the meantime they’ve been buried by such a mountain of evidence that they can’t afford to be quite so brazen any more, but at least they can still pout.  A tendency to ignore evolutionary explanations of human behavior in their work would be an unsurprising manifestation thereof. 

My advice to Prof. Kurzban:  Don’t worry, it’s all good.  The phenomena he’s referring to are an interesting collection of data points on human behavior in their own right, and, in any case, the pouters-in-chief are growing increasingly long in the tooth, and will eventually die off.  Meanwhile, we’ve just experienced a paradigm shift in acceptance of the evolutionary wellsprings of human behavior.  Again, Prof. Kurzban was probably born a bit to late to really grasp what has just happened, but at the moment, books are pouring off the presses in rapid succession that describe the impact of the innate on morality, decision making, and many other aspects of human behavior.  Their reception today is utterly unlike that accorded to books with similar themes in the 60′s and 70′s.  Their authors are not condemned as fascists and racists by their fellow “scientists,” and in the popular media.  Glitzy documentaries do not appear on PBS demonstrating that they are right wing evildoers.  On the contrary, glitzy documentaries appear on PBS praising their conclusions.  They are not ridiculed, as they once were, as “pop ethologists.”  In a word, today’s crop of social scientists may ignore innate behavior, but they are no longer sufficiently suicidal to claim, as they once did, that it doesn’t exist.  Therein lies the paradigm shift. 

We’re hardly out of the woods yet.  Read the comments on Robert’s blog, and you will find some interesting artifacts of ingroup-outgroup behavior and territoriality, in the form of evolutionary psychologists who fondly believe that only they have the right to speak to issues that are of vast significance in philosophy, theology, political science, and, for that matter, to our very survival as a species by virtue of the fact that they have published x number of papers in peer reviewed journals and have been cited x to some exponent number of times by their peers in response.  I have a doctorate in nuclear engineering, and I have worked most of my career in physics.  I would never dare to claim that someone without a Ph.D. in either of those fields is incapable of uttering anything of relevance relating to them.  In fact, I know the contrary to be true.  The most brilliant scientists tend to be focused very narrowly on their research, and are often poor at seeing the big picture.  I find the idea that someone without a certified and approved academic pedigree should not presume to express an opinion regarding behavior dependent on an organ whose workings we are not even close to understanding, namely, the human brain, to be ridiculous.  After the abject debacle of the blank slate?  Please!  Back in the Vietnam days, there was a PFC in my unit named Douglas Littlejohn.  Whenever I made some comment that stretched his credulity to the breaking point, he had a standard reply that seems appropriate here.  “Sir, you must be trying to bullshit me!”

“Stoner” by John Williams

John Edward Williams

What’s great about Stoner?  The same thing that’s great about any great novel.  It gives you an intimate glimpse into the mind of another human being, telling you what they experienced, and how they reacted to it.  In the process, you always recognize yourself; your own thoughts and feelings.

Works like this are written with a simple clarity that’s often missing from the works of philosophy and psychology with which they have much in common.  There’s nothing obscure about them, because the author is unconcerned about impressing you with how smart he is.  Rather, he has an intense desire to make you understand.  Stoner is not only clear, but beautiful.  Many passages in the book read like poetry. 

Look and spread the word.

Darwin’s Unmentionables

Brilliant minds have always debunked prevailing orthodoxies. It’s a measure of the exceptional brilliance of Charles Darwin that he debunked the orthodoxies of religions both spiritual and secular. Of course, the comeuppance of the spiritual true believers was very much above board, punctuated by public spectacles like Clarence Darrow’s skewering of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial. The secular zealots who called the tune in the behavioral sciences through much of the 20th century were a different matter. Their beliefs touching on human nature were every bit as silly as Bishop Ussher’s claim that the earth was only 6000 years old, but they happened to control the message concerning what passed for “science” in such baliwicks as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. More astute than their spiritual brethren, they didn’t deny Darwin. They simply silenced him, or at least those of his theories they happened to find inconvenient.

Perhaps most inconvenient of all were the ideas in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872 a year after The Descent of Man. As Joe Cain writes in his introduction to a recent edition of the book,

Darwin’s rhetorical strategy for both books was simple: narrow the sense of a gap between humans and animals. He did this by depicting animals as far more sophisticated (that is, endowed with increasingly human-like qualities) than most people usually acknowledged. He also did this by presenting human beings as carriers of features which were simply extensions of those found in animals.

He complained how frequently observers underrated the faculties of animals, then gave accounts of a myriad of supposedly human qualities found in some form in animals: foresight, memory, reason, imagination, love, jealousy, the ability to learn from mistakes, wonder, curiosity, attention, tool use, inarticulate language, a sense of beauty, and aesthetics.

All this was, of course, anathema to the clergy of the Blank Slate. Something less than 100 years later they were hurling anathemas at the likes of Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, who were saying what was essentially the same thing. They might shout down Ardrey and Lorenz, but it was not so easy to shout down Darwin. Instead, they studiously ignored him, or at least those of his works that touched on innate human behavioral traits.  They had good reason.  At a time (1968) when Ashley Montagu, high priest of the Blank Slaters, was writing things as phantastically silly about human nature as his spiritual counterparts ever wrote about their imaginary super beings, such as,

What is human nature? What is most important to understand in relation to that question is man’s unique evolutionary history, the manner in which an ape was gradually transformed into a man as he moved from a dimension of limited capacity for learning into an increasingly enlarging zone of adaptation in which he became entirely dependent upon learning from the man-make part of the environment, culture, for his development as a functioning human being; that his brain, far from containing any “phylogenetically programmed” determinants for behavior, is characterized by a supremely highly developed generalized capacity for learning; that this principally constitutes his innate hominid nature, and that he has to learn his human nature frofm the human environment, from the culture that humanizes him, and that therefore, given man’s unique educability, human nature is what man learns to become as a human being.

and,

In fact, I also think it very doubtful that any of the great apes have any instincts. On the contrary, it seems that as social animals they must learn from others everything they come to know and do. Their capacities for learning are simply more limited than those of Homo sapiens.

it wouldn’t do to have people repeating things from the pen of a giant like Darwin such as,

Whenever the same movements of the features or body express the same emotions in several distinct races of man, we may infer with much probability, that such expressions are true ones, -that is, are innate or instinctive.

Most of our emotions are so closely connected with their expression, that they hardly exist if the body remains passive – the nature of the expression depending in chief part on the nature of the actions which have been habitually performed under this particular state of mind.

We have seen that in all parts of the world persons who feel shame for some moral delinquency, are apt to avert, bend down, or hide their faces, independently of any thought about their personal appearance.

and, speaking of a caretaker of the insane,

Dr. Maudsley, after detailing various strange animal-like traits in idiots, asks whether these are not due to the reappearance of primitive instincts – ‘a faint echo from a far-distant past, testifying to a kinship which man has almost outgrown’… ‘the savage snarl, the destructive disposition, the obscene language, the wild howl, the offensive habits, displayed by some of the insane? Why should a human being, deprived of his reason, ever become so brutal in character, as some do, unless he has the brute nature within him?’ The question must, as it would appear, be answered in the affirmative.

In fact, Darwin was merely stating what anyone with a modicum of common sense might infer as an obvious consequence of his theory of evolution by natural selection.  It remained for later generations of behavioral scientists to execute the intellectual contortions and double back flips necessary to deny the obvious and prop up the blank slate.  They did so, not because the blank slate was even remotely plausible or reasonable after the revelations of Darwin, but because it was necessary to conjure up an imaginary race of “human beings” amenable to existence in the Marxist and various other utopias they were concocting for us.

It’s high time that Darwin’s “unmentionable” book was rescued from obscurity.  It deserves to be read.  Anyone who has been following developments in the behavioral sciences for the last decade or so, and, in particular, those that bear on innate human behavior, will notice that it has a surprisingly modern ring to it.  Consider, for example, passages like the following in light of recent research on mirror neurons;

We feel horror if we see any one, for instance a child, exposed to some instant and crushing danger. Almost everyone would experience the same feeling in the highest degree in witnessing a man being tortured or going to be tortured. In these cases there is no danger to ourselves; but from the power of the imagination and of sympathy we put ourselves in the position of the sufferer, and feel something akin to fear.

and, with respect to the recent trend to study children and infants at ever younger ages in order to isolate the innate in human moral behavior,

I shook a pasteboard box close before the eyes of one of my infants, when 114 days old, and it did not in the least wink; but when I put a few comfits into the box, holding it in the same position as before, and rattled them, the child blinked its eyes violently every time, and started a little. It was obviously impossible that a carefully guarded infant could have learnt by experience that such a rattling sound near its eyes indicated danger to them.

There’s another interesting facet of The Expression of the Emotions that reflects the true brilliance and greatness of Darwin.  In marked contrast to the status obsessed denizens of academia in our own day, he was quite capable of admiring and learning from those who hadn’t published in the most up-to-date and approved scientific journals.  One such whom he cited repeatedly in the book as an expert on human behavior was, in fact, a playwright; William Shakespeare.  For example,

The eyes and mouth being widely open is an expression universally recognised as one of surprise or astonishment. Thus Shakespeare says, ‘I saw a smith stand with open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news’ (‘King John’, Act iv, sc. ii). And again, “They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world destroyed. (‘Winter’s Tale’, Act v. sc. ii.)

and,

Shakespeare sums up the chief characteristics of rage as follows:- “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man, As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit To his full height! On, on, you noblest English.”

Oddly enough, the blank slaters accorded the highest respect they were capable of paying to an opponent to another playwright; Robert Ardrey.  For example, writing in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression, psychologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote,

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.

Alas, dear reader, we live in a corrupt age.  The great Darwin felt no embarrassment in heaping even more laurels on the brow of the illustrious bard, but Ardrey, “the most influential writer in English dealing with the innate or instinctive attributes of human nature” but a few decades ago, is forgotten.  You see, he published not a single paper with more than 100 citations in an approved journal.

The Blank Slate Vindicated: Der Spiegel Unearths an Old Believer

Apropos Spiegel magazine, it would seem their team of archeologists has just turned up a fossilized Blank Slater in the person of Jon Beckwith, the Harvard professor who was the first to isolate a gene. In a Spiegel interview, Beckwith railed against studies linking the MAOA gene to asocial behavior. Let’s let Beckwith tell us where the shoe rubs in his own words:

Immediately after the isolation of the gene we called a press conference in Boston to express our concerns. At the time, I didn’t know myself exactly why I was concerned. But in considering what it was that bothered me, I found that I was most concerned about genetic determinism.

It seems to me the good professor is being a bit disingenuous here. He isolated the gene in 1969, in the very heyday of blank slate orthodoxy, when all the “experts” in the behavioral sciences were gravely informing us that there was no such thing as human nature and that, for all practical purposes, all human behavior was learned; a product of culture and environment. This ideological narrative came with distinct political overtones.  Anyone who denied the received “Not in our Genes” wisdom ran the risk of being vilified as a racist and a fascist, and was dismissed as a “genetic determinist.”

In fact, real genetic determinists are as rare as unicorns. I know of no one who can claim the name of scientist without blushing who has ever denied the profound importance of “nurture” in shaping human behavior. “Genetic determinist” was really never anything more than an epithet used to denominate a member of an ideological outgroup. Back in the day, the Blank Slate true believers used the term to demonstrate freedom from such taints.

That was then and this is now. The Blank Slaters now rest slumbering under the mountain of evidence that buried all their fond hopes about the behavioral malleability of our species, and today no one in their right mind denies the importance of innate factors on human behavior. Still, now and then one hears these faint echoes from the past. Old Blank Slaters are like old Communists, defiantly true to the faith in spite of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Capitalist free-for-all in China.  Like them, they will remain Old Believers to the end. One can but wait for them to, as the historian Procopius always said, “Pass from among the world of men.”

As for that slippery MAOA gene, it would seem that Beckwith is a voice in the wilderness.  As he puts it,

According to a study, persons who were mistreated in childhood and also carried a certain variety of the MAOA gene were at increased risk for anti-social behavior. But in the meantime there have been ten studies that have tried to confirm these results. Most of them could not replicate the original findings.

…While no one notices, public opinion is influenced by false, long debunked ideas. In the case of the MAOA gene things went so far, that judges were asking geneticists whether genetics had now revealed that criminals don’t even have free will. The possibility arose that a single study that only investigated a single family could have influenced the outcome of court decisions – an amazing development!

Here the good professor is imposing on our credulity somewhat.  Things were never quite that cut and dried, even in the courts.  Psychiatric News, the journal of the American Psychiatric Association, spoke of “mounting evidence” linking MAOA with conduct disorder in an article published in 2004.  Since then, MAOA has also been linked to violent behavior (2006), childhood sex abuse and alcoholism (2007), and even credit card debt (2010).  Evidently the conflicting studies were published in rather obscure journals.  Sadly, Spiegel does not provide us with any links. 

As to Professor Beckwith’s contention that a suitably equipped expedition might capture a genuine Genetic Determinist in the wild wastelands of the dysfunctional and debauched American legal system, one can hardly dismiss the possibility with a wave of the hand.  Even rarer birds turn up occasionally in those realms.

The Case of Margaret Mead: Icon of the Blank Slate

Margaret Mead

I wonder how many of the people who have been furious detractors or avid supporters of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa have actually read the book. Very few, if the comments I’ve seen about it are any guide. The book is supposed to be one of the holy Gospels of the Blank Slate, or the theory that there is, for all practical purposes, no such thing as innate human nature, a palpably false notion that somehow managed to mesmerize the practitioners of the sciences of human behavior through much of the 20th century. How such a seemingly innocuous little book could have risen to such prominence and been accorded such ideological significance is a subject that may well busy future generations of psychologists.

On the face of it, the book seems to be a collection of observations concerning the natives of Samoa written by a talented and intelligent young anthropologist who had visited the islands for a period of something under a year. A student of the noted psychologist Frank Boas, she was particularly interested in finding if the apparent stress and strain of adolescence for girls growing up in western societies was really unavoidable, or merely the reflection of a dysfunctional culture. I find no intent to deceive in the book, no excessive confirmation bias, and no evidence that Mead was a person easily duped by the individuals she was studying into believing something that she wanted to believe, but that was actually false.

Boas did Mead no favor by writing in a foreword to the book:

The results of the painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.

The statement is both crudely unscientific (a brief study like Mead’s could “confirm” no such sweeping conclusion one way or the other), and self-contradictory (why would human beings “react to restraints” if it is not their nature to do so?). Such inflammatory nonsense amounted to putting a target on Mead’s back. I am not familiar enough with her work to know if she ever made such a sweeping claim herself in some other work, but nothing like it appears in Coming of Age. In Dilthey’s Dream, a collection of essays by Mead’s great foe, Derek Freeman, he makes the claim,

In the thirteenth chapter of Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead went even further, claiming on the basis of her enquiries into adolescence in Samoa, that explanations other than in terms of environmental factors could not be made.

I have carefully parsed the chapter in question, and can only conclude that Freeman had a lively imagination. Mead did constantly stress the importance of culture in the book, but I find nothing, in the thirteenth chapter or elsewhere, that positively excludes other than cultural influences on human behavior. What she actually did say was consistent with a comment that appeared in a preface she wrote for the 1973 edition of the book:

But the renascence of racism among some scientists and the pleas for a harsh, manipulative behavioralism among some psychologists make me wonder whether the modern world understands much more about the significance of culture – the interplay between individual endowment and cultural style, the limits set by biology and the way in which human imagination can transcend those limits – than was known in 1928.

Here Mead is wearing her well-known political activism on her sleeve, but she clearly distances herself from the extreme versions of the Blank Slate that were prevalent in 1973 and explicitly acknowledges that there are “limits set by biology.” This statement, written near the end of her career, seems to position her closer to modern theories of human nature than to the extreme “nurture vs. nature” orthodoxy of the mid-20th century.

Freeman isn’t the only one who has transformed Coming of Age to an ideological icon in his imagination, attributing extreme claims to it that one searches for in vain in the actual book. In rounding up the usual suspects, we find that Steven Pinker, that master chef of philosopher soup, has done the same thing. In his book The Blank Slate, he cites Coming of Age as a prime example of the “noble savage” fallacy, claiming in particular that Mead portrays Samoan society as egalitarian. She does no such thing. Her book is full of descriptions of the hierarchical traditions of the culture, and the consciousness and importance of rank and status. As far as the “noble savage” is concerned, Mead explicitly rejected some aspects of Samoan culture as inimical to those values of Western civilization that she believed should be preserved.

As for Freeman, he was a strange bird. Like Sam Harris, he had the notion that his understanding of human nature was so acute that he could use it to cobble together a new morality. For example, again from Dilthey’s Dream:

One of my main conclusions then is that there is a need for a critical anthropology of human values. Human cultures being value systems are “experiments in living,” and a critical anthropology would be concerned with assessing the consequences of these “experiments in living” in the hope that we might gradually learn to select our values with greater wisdom.

He seems to have elevated Mead to the role of quintessential representative of the Blank Slate in his imagination, and was obsessed with the bizarre notion that, if he could only prove that her claims about sexuality in Samoan adolescents were wrong, he would not only debunk Mead, but single-handedly demolish the Blank Slate itself. In fact, whether adolescent Samoan girls in the 1920s were as chaste as the most straight-laced Victorians, or just as Mead described them, it would “prove” nothing at all about human nature. Factual or not, Mead’s version of Samoan sexuality was well within the parameters already observed in other societies by observers both modern and ancient.

The question remains of whether Mead’s findings about the relative sexual freedom of women and girls in Samoan society were true or, as Freeman claimed, a figment of her imagination based on the claims of Samoan girls who told her what she seemed to want to hear as something of a practical joke. It happens that there is much of relevance to this question in a book entitled An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands by an Englishman who had lived among them for many years published in 1817. Thanks to Google books, this account, a wonderful anthropological study in its own right, can be read online. In includes a section on sexual behavior, noting that married women tended to be true to their husbands, but that marriage bonds were weak, and many of them were married multiple times. Unmarried women, on the other hand, enjoyed virtually untrammeled sexual freedom. Quoting from the book (page 173):

If a man divorces his wife, which is attended with no other ceremony than just telling her that she may go, she becomes perfect mistress of her own conduct, and may marry again, which is often done a few days afterwards, without the least disparagement to her character: or if she chooses, she may remain single and admit a lover occasionally, or may cohabit with her lover for a time, and remain at his house without being considered his wife, having no particular charge of his domestic concerns, and may leave him when she pleases, and this she may also do without the least reproach or secrecy.

…once divorced, they can remain single if they please, and enjoy all the liberty that the most libertine heart can desire.

…As to those women who are not actually married, they may bestow their favours upon whomsoever they please, without any opprobrium.

Remarkably, the author claimed that, in spite of this, the women were relatively chaste, if not compared to Europe, than at least compared to other island groups in the region, including Samoa, to which the natives occasionally traveled in their ocean-going canoes. In a review of the book that appeared in the April 1817 edition of the British Quarterly Review we learn, for example:

The women are much less immodest than in the other islands, and maternal affection exists as strongly among them as among the nations where the instincts of nature are fostered and strengthened by the sense of duty.

In a word, score one for Mead. It would seem that Freeman was the one who had his leg pulled.

If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it is that, before becoming firmly convinced about what an author said, it is useful to actually read her book beforehand.  Paul Shankman has written an account of the Mead – Freeman controversy entitled The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. An interesting review of the book may be found here.

Criticism, Self-criticism, and Thoughtcrime

Certain psychological types seem to persist across cultures.  For example, here is Stalin in a letter to writer and journalist Maxim Gorky:

We cannot do without self-criticism. We simply cannot, Alexei Maximovich. Without it, stagnation, corruption of the apparatus, growth of bureaucracy, sapping of the creative initiative of the working class, is inevitable. I know there are people in the ranks of the party who have no fondness for criticism in general, and for self-criticism in particular. Those people, whom I might call “skin-deep” communists… shrug their shoulders at self-criticism, as much as to say: … again this raking out of our shortcomings – can’t we be allowed to live in peace!

Of course, there were limits on the Communists’ fondness for self-criticism.  When Gorky criticized them in his paper Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) for their brutal excesses immediately after their seizure of power, they shut him down, and he was lucky to get away with his life. 

Here’s a similar bit from another variant of the worker’s paradise, Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution.  It’s from the book Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang, and describes the author’s experiences in one of the “self-criticism” sessions the Communists used to terrorize both adults and children (the author was 12 years old at the time).  She had called one of her friends by a nickname, and been overheard by one of the school bullies, who appropriately belonged to the “Red Successors,” a younger version of the Red Guards.  He dressed her down as follows:

It isn’t simply a matter of calling people by nicknames. It’s a matter of your looking down on working-class people… This is connected with your class standing Jiang Ji-li. You should reflect on your class origin and thoroughly remold your ideology… You’d better think seriously about your problems.

Moving right along to our own time, we find Greg Sargent addressing some similarly charming comments to Juan Williams in a column that appeared in the Washington Post.  Williams, you may recall, was just fired by NPR for what George Orwell once called Thoughtcrime.  Quoting from Sargent’s article:

The problem, though, is that in his initial comments he didn’t clarify that the instinctual feeling itself is irrational and ungrounded, and something folks need to battle against internally whenever it rears its head. And in his subsequent comments on Fox today, Williams again conspicuously failed to make that point.

Maybe Williams does think those feelings are unacceptably irrational and need to be wrestled with, and perhaps someone should ask him more directly if he thinks that. But until he clearly states it to be the case, there’s no reason to assume he thinks we should battle those feelings and work to delegitimize them.

Far be it for me to suggest that Sargent has anything at all in common with Stalin or Mao, or that his thought is otherwise anything but politically correct.  I merely suggest, based on admittedly anecdotal evidence, that there seem to be some psychological commonalities in human types that persist across cultures.  Apparently others have noticed the same thing.  Jim Treacher’s take in a piece he wrote for the Daily Caller was somewhat more emphatic:

It’s true, I haven’t heard Juan Williams call for the abolition of all crimethink. Thank goodness we have Greg Sargent of the Washington Post to remind us what’s permissible to think. Not what’s permissible to act on, or even to say aloud, but to think. How can we all be free if people are allowed to think in unapproved ways?

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death.”

The Soul of Eugene Marais and the Origin of a “Revolutionary Theory”

Eugene Marais

How can one describe a man as brilliant as Eugene Marais? Perhaps accounts of such men are best left to the bards. Robert Ardrey, who wrote a lengthy introduction to Marais’ The Soul of the Ape, was a bard (or, more accurately, a playwright) for much of his career. I will leave the task to him:

Eugene Marais was a human community in the person of one man. He was a poet, an advocate, a journalist, a story-teller, a drug addict, a psychologist, a natural scientist. He embraced the pains of many, the visions of the few, and perhaps the burden was too much for one man… As a scientist he was unique, supreme in his time, yet a worker in a science then unborn.

A South African, Marais’ first book, The Soul of the White Ant, was a compilation of a series of articles about African termites originally published between 1923 and 1925 in his native Afrikaans (the same word is used for “soul” and “mind” in Afrikaans). His work was crudely plagiarized by Maurice Maeterlinck, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911, in his Life of the White Ant. The incident is described in a preface to Marais’ book by his translator:

About six years after these articles appeared, Maurice Maeterlinck published his book The Life of the White Ant, in which he described the organic unity of the termitary and compared it with the human body. The theory created great interest at the time and was generally accepted as an original one formulated by Maeterlinck. The fact that an unknown South African observer had developed the theory after many years of extensive labor was not generally known in Europe.

Marais’ masterpiece, The Soul of the Ape, is the first prolonged scientific study of primates in the wild (in this case, the baboon) ever published. Although he had published vignettes of his life with baboons in a little volume called My Friends the Baboons, the unfinished manuscript of his great work was not discovered and published until over a quarter of a century after his death. Like The Soul of the White Ant, the work virtually sparkles with remarkable hypotheses. Some were wide of the mark. Others were of enduring brilliance, and one such has recently been reborn, unattributed and described as a “revolutionary theory.”

Marais devised the terms “phyletic memory” and “causal memory” to describe his observations of animal behavior. The former referred to instinctive behavior. As Marais put it,

There are many analogies between memory and instinct, and although these may not extend to fundamentals, they are still of such a nature that the term phyletic memory will always convey a clear understanding of the most characteristic attributes of instinct.

By causal memory Marais meant the higher cognitive ability we usually associate with the term, or, as he described it, “the ability to memorize the relation of cause and effect.”  He believed that this type of memory had assumed a dominant evolutionary role in primates, giving them the ability to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments.  As he noted in the case of his baboons, who quickly learned to avoid men with guns after their first encounter with them,

Here we have behavior shaped entirely by the new memory. The animal is burdened by no ready-made hereditary memory useful only in meeting customary events in its environment and likely to become highly disadvantageous in the presence of new and unaccustomed conditions.

As I alluded to earlier, Marais’ idea recently had a curtain call on an episode of Nova’s Becoming Human series, where it is described as a “radical new theory,” and attributed to paleoanthropologist Rick Potts.  To the best of my knowledge, Potts himself never made such a claim.  However, according to the account in Becoming Human, the brain size of human ancestors had “flat-lined” for around four million years after they had first begun walking on two legs.  Then, over a period of no more than half a million years, there had been a remarkable increase in brain capacity.  Asking the rhetorical question, “Why this sudden take off,” Nova goes on to describe research confirming “wild climate changes” in Africa during the period.  For example, core samples indicated that a massive lake had appeared, disappeared, and reappeared on the same spot many times under climactic conditions of constant flux, including radical changes over periods of as little as a thousand years.  Enter Rick Potts, who, in Nova’s account, had just formulated a “bold theory of human evolution,” according to which our ancestors had acquired large brains in the process of “adapting to change itself.”  Elaborating on this theme, once again touted as a “revolutionary idea,” Nova describes the process as an ”adaptation to versatility,” by which our ancestors rapidly acquired big brains and high intelligence in response to these cataclysmic climate swings.

I will let Marais himself answer this claim to “revolutionary ideas.”  In The Soul of the Ape, published in 1969, he writes:

If now we picture the great continent of Africa with its extreme diversity of natural conditions – its high, cold, treeless plateaux; its impenetrable tropical forests; its great river systems; its inland seas; its deserts; its rain and droughts; its sudden climatic changes capable of altering the natural aspect of great tracts of country in a few years – all forming an apparently systemless chaos, and then picture its teeming masses of competing organic life, comprising more species, more numbers and of greater size than can be found on any other continent on earth, is it not at once evident how great would be the advantage if under such conditions a species could be liberated from the limiting force of hereditary memories? Would it not be conducive to preservation if under such circumstances a species could either suddenly change its habitat or meet any new natural conditions thrust upon it by means of immediate adaptation? Is it not self-evident that in a species far-wandering, whether on account of sudden natural changes, competitive pressure, or through inborn “wanderlust,” those individuals which could best and most quickly adapt themselves to the most varied conditions would be the ones most likely to survive and perpetuate the race, and that among species, one equipped for distant migrations would always have a better chance than a confined one? Are not all the elements present to bring about the natural selection of an attribute by means of which a species could thus meet and neutralise one of the most prolific causes of destruction?

This is not advanced as a demonstrable theory. It is no more than an attempt to show that it is hardly possible to imagine conditions existing anywhere in nature at any time which would not in some degree tend towards the evolution of such an attribute. If these present conditions are self-evidently likely to select it, how much more likely, for instance, would not its birth and growth have been during the earlier history of the planet, during the Pleistocene period, when cataclysmic movements of its crust and great and repeated climatic changes still belonged to the usual and customary category of natural events.

So much for Nova’s “revolutionary idea.” Perhaps we should not be surprised by this particular case of scientific amnesia.  After all, Marais’ name is closely associated with that of a man of similar talent and genius; Robert Ardrey.  Ardrey dedicated his first book, African Genesis to him, and, as noted earlier, wrote a lengthy and charming introduction to The Soul of the Ape.  Unfortunately, Ardrey smashed the singularly implausible notion of the Blank Slate rather earlier than was convenient to fit the narrative of the modern community of ”experts” in human behavior, according to which that brilliant deed was only begun more than a decade after the appearance of African Genesis by E. O. Wilson with his Sociobiology.   As a result, Ardrey has become an unperson among them, and anyone associated with his memory is, no doubt, suspect as well. 

No matter.  The genius of Marais speaks for itself.  Ardrey wrote a much better farewell to him than I could have done:

Just as a remarkable guest, one of vision and many anecdotes and a remote madness, might spend an evening by our fire, then glance at his watch and rise, so Marais takes his leave. There is a suddenness that is part of our knowledge that we shall never see him again. And we watch through the curtains as our visitor from times past walks down the path, touching things with his cane. Beyond the gate he turns down the road to the right, swinging his cane more freely. He passes under a streetlamp and vanishes in the darkness beyond the trees. Whom else did he ever visit? Where else did he go?

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.