It is fair to say that “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” as Daniel
Dennett has described it, has caused more trouble to the ordinary
conscience than just about any other scientific hypothesis. We
cannot easily reject the theory of evolution, which explains so
much that we observe in the lives of plants and animals; and we
cannot easily accept it either, when it comes to understanding
human beings. It is not only the religious world-view that seems so
precarious in the light of it. All kinds of moral aspirations, set
against what we can know or surmise about our hunter-gatherer
ancestors, seem to be so much wishful thinking. How can we
entertain the liberal hope for equality between the sexes, for
universal human rights, for a global community without wars, when
we reflect on the harsh conditions in which our species is said to
have evolved, and for the need, in those conditions, for
belligerence, relations of domination, and an innate division of
labor between woman and man?
For a long time in the wake of Darwin’s Descent of Man,
social scientists and anthropologists argued that human beings are
not simply biological organisms, whose behavior is to be explained
by their inherited constitution, but also social beings, whose most
important traits are “socially constructed.” On this view culture
is an independent influence, which works on the raw material of
human biology and changes it into something finer, more malleable,
and more responsive to moral and spiritual ideals. In this way,
thinkers like Durkheim and Weber hoped to rescue human nature from
Darwin by describing another input into our behavior than our
biological inheritance. Not only did this give a new purchase to
religion; it liberated morality from the constraints of
evolutionary thinking. Morality was returned to its throne as a
guide to life, by which wisdom and reason override the demands of
instinct and desire.
But the respite from Darwin was only short-lived. Evolutionary
psychologists have since turned their attention to culture itself,
arguing that culture is not, after all, an independent input into
human behavior. Culture too, they argue, is part of our biological
inheritance. It is not simply that there are extraordinary
constants among the many cultures that we observe: gender roles,
incest taboos, rites of passage, festivals, warfare, mourning,
religious beliefs, moral scruples, aesthetic interests. Culture is
also a part of human nature: it is our way of being. We do
not live in herds or packs; our hierarchies are not based on
strength or sexual dominance. We relate to one another through
language, morality, and law; we sing together, dance together,
worship together, and spend as much time in festivals and story
telling as in seeking our food. Our hierarchies involve offices,
responsibilities, gift-giving, and ceremonial recognition. Our
meals are shared, and food for us is not merely nourishment but the
occasion for hospitality, affection, and dressing up. All these
things are comprehended in the idea of culture and culture, so
understood, is uniquely human. Why is this?
The social scientists respond that culture is uniquely human
because we created it. But the Darwinians reject that answer as a
fudge: if we created culture, what explains our capacity to create
it? The answer is that this capacity evolved. Culture is therefore
an adaptation, which exists because it conferred a reproductive
advantage on our hunter-gatherer ancestors. According to this view,
many of our cultural traits are local variations of attributes
acquired during the Pleistocene age and now “hard-wired in the
brain.” But if this is so, cultural characteristics may not be as
plastic as the social scientists suggest. There are features of the
human condition, such as gender roles, that people have believed to
be cultural and therefore changeable. But if culture is an aspect
of nature, “cultural” does not mean “changeable.” Maybe these
controversial features of human culture are part of the genetic
endowment of mankind.
This new way of thinking gains credibility from the evolutionary
theory of morality. Many social scientists suppose morality to be
an acquired characteristic, passed on by customs, laws and
punishments in which a society asserts its rights over its members.
However, with the development of genetics, a new perspective opens.
“Altruism” begins to look like a genetic “strategy,” which confers
a reproductive advantage on the genes that produce it. In the
competition for scarce resources, the genetically altruistic are
able to call others to their aid, through networks of cooperation
that are withheld from the genetically selfish, who are thereby
eliminated from the game.
If this is so, it is argued, then morality is not an acquired
but an inherited characteristic. Any competitor species that failed
to develop innate moral feelings would by now have died out. And
what is true of morality might be true of many other human
characteristics that have previously been attributed to nurture:
language, art, music, religion, warfare, the local variants of
which are far less significant than their common structure.
If we accept the argument of the evolutionary biologists,
therefore, we may find ourselves pushed toward accepting that
traits often attributed to culture may be part of our genetic
inheritance, and therefore not as changeable as many might have
hoped: gender differences, intelligence, belligerence, and so on
through all the human characteristics that people have wished, for
whatever reason, to rescue from destiny and refashion as choice.
But to speculate freely about such matters is dangerous. The once
respectable subject of eugenics was so discredited by Nazism that
“don’t enter” is now written across its door. The distinguished
biologist James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure
of DNA, was recently run out of the academy for having publicly
suggested that sub-Saharan Africans are genetically disposed to
have lower IQs than the Westerners who strive to help them, while
the economist Larry Summers suffered a similar fate for claiming
that the brains of women are at the top end less suited than those
of men to the study of the hard sciences. In America it is widely
assumed that socially significant differences between ethnic groups
and sexes are the result of social factors, and in particular of
“discrimination” directed against the group that does badly. This
assumption is not the conclusion of a reasoned social science but
the foundation of an optimistic world-view, to disturb which is to
threaten the whole community that has been built on it. On the
other hand, as Galileo in comparable circumstances didn’t quite
say, it ain’t necessarily so.
SOME CONSERVATIVES take comfort from this, arguing that liberal
egalitarian values are, after all, no more than wishful thinking,
and that the attempt to impose them through the school and
university curriculum goes against human nature and is therefore
doomed to failure. To take this line, however, is to announce the
defeat of liberalism by conceding the defeat of conservatism too.
Conservatism is founded, like liberalism, on the assumption that
human beings are free, that they can to a certain measure shift the
boundaries that constrain them, and that there is a right and wrong
in human affairs which are not simply dictated by biology. It is
imperative, therefore, to find another response to the evolutionary
picture. The real question raised by evolutionary biology and
neuroscience is not whether those sciences can be refuted, but
whether we can accept what they have to say while still
holding on to the beliefs and attitudes that morality demands of
us.
From Kant and Hegel to Wittgenstein and Husserl, there have been
attempts to give a philosophy of the human condition that
stands apart from biological science without opposing it. Those
great thinkers told us in their several ways that we are both human
beings and persons. Human beings form a biological kind, and it is
for science to describe that kind. Probably it will do so in the
way that the evolutionary psychologists propose. But persons do not
form a biological kind, or any other sort of natural kind. The
concept of the person is shaped in another way, not by our attempt
to explain things but by our attempt to understand, to interact, to
hold to account, to relate. The “why?” of personal understanding is
not the “why?” of scientific inference. And it is answered by
conceptualizing the world under the aspect of freedom and choice.
Our world is a palimpsest, and over the book of nature, written in
the language of cause and effect, there is another and
incommensurable text, written in the language of freedom. We cannot
rewrite the book of nature so that it accords with our hopes and
ideals, for these have no place in that book. But we can rewrite
the book of freedom, and that is where the contests lie.
Consider, then, the dispute over gender and gender equality.
Liberals do not deny that there are two biologically fixed kinds of
human being—the male and the female; but they deny that there are
two culturally fixed kinds of person—the masculine and the
feminine. For the liberal, the division of roles, rights, and
duties that conservatives defend is neither decreed by nature nor
endorsed by the moral law. The response of conservatives should be
to defend this division of roles, rights, and duties for what it
is—the foundation of the most important personal relation that we
have, which is the relation that binds a man and a woman in
marriage. I don’t think I have ever written a sentence more
politically incorrect than that one. Nevertheless, as Galileo was
wise enough not to say, if you don’t like it, that’s your
problem.
