The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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The most obvious example is the debate on strict constructionism and judicial restraint on one side and judicial activism in pursuit of social justice on the other. Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1954 to 1969, was the prototypical judicial activist, who led the court to implement desegregation and expand the rights of the accused. He was known for interrupting lawyers in mid-argument by asking, “Is it right? Is it good?” The opposing view was stated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said his job was “to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not.” He conceded that “to improve conditions of life and the race is the main thing,” and added, “But how the devil can I tell whether I am not pulling it down more in some other place?”15 Those with the Tragic Vision see judicial activism as an invitation to egotism and caprice and as unfair to those who have played by the rules as they were publicly stated. Those with the Utopian Vision see judicial restraint as the mindless preservation of arbitrary injustices—as Dickens’s Mr. Bumble put it, “The law is an ass.”16 An infamous example is the Dred Scott decision of 1856, in which the Supreme Court ruled on narrow legalistic grounds that a freed slave could not sue to make his freedom official and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories.
Radical political reform, like radical judicial reform, will be more or less appealing depending on one’s confidence in human intelligence and wisdom. In the Utopian Vision, solutions to social problems are readily available. Speaking in 1967 about the conditions that breed violence, Lyndon Johnson said, “All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.”17 If we already know the solutions, all we have to do is choose to implement them, and that requires only sincerity and dedication. By the same logic, anyone opposing the solutions must be motivated by blindness, dishonesty, and callousness. Those with the Tragic Vision say instead that solutions to social problems are elusive. The inherent conflicts of interest among people leave us with few options, all of them imperfect. Opponents of radical reform are showing a wise distrust of human hubris.
The political orientation of the universities is another manifestation of conflicting visions of human potential. Adherents of the Tragic Vision distrust knowledge stated in explicitly articulated and verbally justified propositions, which is the stock-in-trade of academics, pundits, and policy analysts. Instead they trust knowledge that is distributed diffusely throughout a system (such as a market economy or set of social mores) and which is tuned by adjustments by many simple agents using feedback from the world. (Cognitive scientists will be reminded of the distinction between symbolic representations and distributed neural networks, and that is no coincidence: Hayek, the foremost advocate of distributed intelligence in societies, was an early neural network modeler.)18 For much of the twentieth century, political conservatism had an anti-intellectual streak, until conservatives decided to play catch-up in the battle for hearts and minds and funded policy think tanks as a counterweight to universities.
Finally, the disagreements on crime and war fall right out of the conflicting theories of human nature. Given the obvious waste and cruelty of war, those with the Utopian Vision see it as a kind of pathology that arises from misunderstandings, shortsightedness, and irrational passions. War is to be prevented by public expressions of pacifist sentiments, better communication between potential enemies, less saber-rattling rhetoric, fewer weapons and military alliances, a de-emphasis on patriotism, and negotiating to avert war at any cost. Adherents of the Tragic Vision, with their cynical view of human nature, see war as a rational and tempting strategy for people who think they can gain something for themselves or their nation. The calculations might be mistaken in any instance, and they may be morally deplorable because they give no weight to the suffering of the losers, but they are not literally pathological or irrational. On this view the only way to ensure peace is to raise the cost of war to potential aggressors by developing weaponry, arousing patriotism, rewarding bravery, flaunting one’s might and resolve, and negotiating from strength to deter blackmail.
The same arguments divide the visions on crime. Those with the Utopian Vision see crime as inherently irrational and seek to prevent it by identifying the root causes. Those with the Tragic Vision see crime as inherently rational and believe that the root cause is all too obvious: people rob banks because that’s where the money is. The most effective crime-prevention programs, they say, strike directly at the rational incentives. A high probability of unpleasant punishment raises the anticipated cost of crime. A public emphasis on personal responsibility helps enforce the incentives by closing any loopholes left open by the law. And strict parenting practices allow children to internalize these contingencies early in life.19
AND ONTO THIS battlefield strode an innocent E. O. Wilson. The ideas from evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. That vision was, after all, based on the Blank Slate (no permanent human nature), the Noble Savage (no selfish or evil instincts), and the Ghost in the Machine (an unfettered “we” that can choose better social arrangements). And here were scientists talking about selfish genes! And saying that adaptations are not for the good of the species but for the good of individuals and their kin (as if to vindicate Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society”). That people scrimp on altruism because it is vulnerable to cheaters. That in prestate societies men go to war even when they are well fed, because status and women are permanent Darwinian incentives. That the moral sense is riddled with biases, including a tendency to self-deception. And that conflicts of genetic interest are built in to social animals and leave us in a state of permanent tragedy. It looked as if the scientists were saying to proponents of the Tragic Vision: You’re right, they’re wrong.
The Utopians, particularly those in the radical science movement, replied that current findings on human intelligence and motivation are irrelevant. They can tell us only about what we have achieved in today’s society, not what we might achieve in tomorrow’s. Since we know that social arrangements can change if we decide to change them, any scientist who speaks of constraints on human nature must want oppression and injustice to continue.
My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. The sciences say nothing, of course, about differences in values that are associated with particular right-wing and left-wing positions (such as in the tradeoffs between unemployment and environmental protection, diversity and economic efficiency, or individual freedom and community cohesion). Nor do they speak directly to policies that are based on a complex mixture of assumptions about the world. But they do speak to the parts of the visions that are general claims about how the mind works. Those claims may be evaluated against the facts, just like any empirical hypothesis. The Utopian vision that human nature might radically change in some imagined society of the remote future is, of course, literally unfalsifiable, but I think that many of the discoveries recounted in preceding chapters make it unlikely. Among them I would include the following:
• The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance.20
• The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented.21
• The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.22
• The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.23
• Th
e partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom.24
• The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.25
• The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.26
It is not just conventional scientific data that tell us the mind is not infinitely malleable. I think it is no coincidence that beliefs that were common among intellectuals in the 1960s—that democracies are obsolete, revolution is desirable, the police and armed forces dispensable, and society designable from the top down—are now rarer. The Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision inspired historical events whose interpretations are much clearer than they were just a few decades ago. Those events can serve as additional data to test the visions’ claims about human psychology.
The visions contrast most sharply in the political revolutions they spawned. The first revolution with a Utopian Vision was the French Revolution—recall Wordsworth’s description of the times, with “human nature seeming born again.” The revolution overthrew the ancien régime and sought to begin from scratch with the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and a belief that salvation would come from vesting authority in a morally superior breed of leaders. The revolution, of course, sent one leader after another to the guillotine as each failed to measure up to usurpers who felt they had a stronger claim to wisdom and virtue. No political structure survived the turnover of personnel, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by Napoleon. The Russian Revolution was also animated by the Utopian Vision, and it also burned through a succession of leaders before settling into the personality cult of Stalin. The Chinese Revolution, too, put its faith in the benevolence and wisdom of a man who displayed, if anything, a particularly strong dose of human foibles like dominance, lust, and self-deception. The perennial limitations of human nature prove the futility of political revolutions based only on the moral aspirations of the revolutionaries. In the words of the song about revolution by The Who: Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
Sowell points out that Marxism is a hybrid of the two visions.27 It invokes the Tragic Vision to interpret the past, when earlier modes of production left no choice but the forms of social organization known as feudalism and capitalism. But it invokes a Utopian Vision for the future, in which we can shape our nature in dialectical interaction with the material and social environment. In that new world, people will be motivated by self-actualization rather than self-interest, allowing us to realize the ideal, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Marx wrote that a communist society would be
the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved.28
It doesn’t get any less tragic or more Utopian than that. Marx dismissed the worry that selfishness and dominance would corrupt those carrying out the general will. For example, he waved off the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s fear that the workers in charge would become despotic: “If Mr. Bakunin were familiar just with the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative, he could send all his nightmares about authority to the devil.”29
In the heyday of radical science, any proposal about human nature that conflicted with the Marxist vision was dismissed as self-evidently wrong. But history is a kind of experiment, albeit an imperfectly controlled one, and its data suggest that it was the radical assessment that got it wrong. Marxism is now almost universally recognized as an experiment that failed, at least in its worldly implementations.30 The nations that adopted it either collapsed, gave it up, or languish in backward dictatorships. As we saw in earlier chapters, the ambition to remake human nature turned its leaders into totalitarian despots and mass murderers. And the assumption that central planners were morally disinterested and cognitively competent enough to direct an entire economy led to comical inefficiencies with serious consequences. Even the more humane forms of European socialism have been watered down to the point where so-called Communist Parties have platforms that not long ago would have been called reactionary. Wilson, the world’s expert on ants, may have had the last laugh in his verdict on Marxism: “Wonderful theory. Wrong species.”31
“Two CHEERS FOR democracy,” proclaimed E. M. Forster. “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried,” said Winston Churchill. These are encomiums worthy of the Tragic Vision. For all their flaws, liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale social organization our sorry species has come up with so far. They provide more comfort and freedom, more artistic and scientific vitality, longer and safer lives, and less disease and pollution than any of the alternatives. Modern democracies never have famines, almost never wage war on one another, and are the top choice of people all over the world who vote with their feet or with their boats. The moderate success of democracies, like the failures of radical revolutions and of Marxist governments, is now widely enough agreed upon that it may serve as another empirical test for rival theories of human nature.
The modern concept of democracy emerged in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and was refined in the frenzy of theorizing that surrounded the American independence movement. It is no coincidence that the major theoreticians of the social contract, such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, were also major armchair psychologists. As Madison wrote, “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”32
The brains behind the American Revolution (which is sometimes labeled with the oxymoron “conservative revolution”) inherited the tragic vision of thinkers like Hobbes and Hume.33 (Significantly, the founders appear not to have been influenced by Rousseau at all, and the popular belief that they got the idea of democracy from the Iroquois Federation is just 1960s granola.)34 The legal scholar John McGinnis has argued that their theory of human nature could have come right out of modern evolutionary psychology.35 It acknowledges the desire of individuals to further their interests in the form of an inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The state emerges from an agreement instituted to protect those rights, rather than being the embodiment of an autonomous superorganism. Rights need to be protected because when people live together their different talents and circumstances will lead some of them to possess things that others want. (“Men have different and unequal faculties for acquiring property,” noted Madison.)36 There are two ways to get something you want from other people: steal it or trade for it. The first involves the psychology of dominance; the second, the psychology of reciprocal altruism. The goal of a peaceful and prosperous society is to minimize the use of dominance, which leads to violence and waste, and to maximize the use of reciprocity, which leads to gains in trade that make everyone better off.
The Constitution, McGinnis shows, was consciously designed to implement these goals. It encouraged reciprocal exchanges through the Commerce Clause, which authorized Congress to remove barriers to trade imposed by the states. It protected them from the danger of cheaters through the Contracts Clause, which prevented states from impairing the enforcement of contracts. And it precluded rulers from confiscating the fruits of the more productive citizens via the Takings Clause, which forbids the government to expropriate private property without compensation.
The feature of human nature that most impressed the framers was the drive for dominance and esteem, which, they feared, imperils all forms of government. Someone must be empowered to make decisions and enforce laws, and that someone i
s inherently vulnerable to corruption. How to anticipate and limit that corruption became an obsession of the framers. John Adams wrote, “The desire for the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger. It is the principal end of government to regulate this passion.”37 Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The love of fame [is] the ruling passion of the noblest minds.”38 James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”39
So external and internal controls there would be. “Parchment barriers,” said Madison, were not enough; rather, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”40 Checks and balances were instituted to stalemate any faction that grew too powerful. They included the division of authority between federal and state governments, the separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches, and the splitting of the legislative branch into two houses.
Madison was especially adamant that the Constitution rein in the part of human nature that encourages war, which is not a primitive lust for blood, he claimed, but an advanced lust for esteem:
War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is created, and it is the executive will to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war finally that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and the most dangerous weakness of the human breast—ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame—are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.41