Variation, Kinsey concluded, is the basis of both biological and cultural evolution. You cannot categorize humans as either tall or short, blond or brunette, black or white. “Dichotomous variation is the exception and continuous variation is the rule, among men as well as among insects.” Likewise for behavior, we identify right and wrong, “without allowance for the endlessly varied types of behavior that are possible between the extreme right and the extreme wrong.” That being the case, the hope for cultural evolution, like that of biological evolution, depends on the recognition of variation and individualism: “These individual differences are the materials out of which nature achieves progress, evolution in the organic world. In the differences between men lie the hopes of a changing society.”45
This extension of his scientific analysis into the realm of morality, coupled with his expose of what humans do behind closed doors, brought Kinsey much wrath and taught him more about WASPs than wasps. In a “Last Statement” dictated two weeks before his death, Kinsey noted with some bitterness the human foible of bias that seems to enter into the evaluation of human moral behavior. He bemoaned the fact that his strongest detractors were his fellow scientists, who had found difficulty “in facing facts of human sexual behavior with anything like objectivity.” One prominent scientist with a powerful political position in Washington, D.C., said unequivocally: “I do not like Kinsey, I do not like the Kinsey project, I do not like anything about the Kinsey study of sexual behavior.”46 Even Kinsey’s colleagues at Indiana University held reservations about the publication of Kinsey’s data. One department head recommended complete censorship, while another proposed delaying publication until the material was screened by the Department of Public Relations.
Such reactions are not surprising considering the political climate of 1950s McCarthy-era America. Protestant ethics forbidding sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage were bumping up against the realities of human nature. As Kinsey noted, men’s and women’s sexual drives do not arrest themselves while awaiting the delayed marriages of modern culture. For the modern man, for example, “The society in which he lives condemns nearly all forms of sexual outlet except that legalized by marriage, but the economic system in which he finds himself imposes a delay in marriage of something like seven to twelve or more years. The teachers of morals blithely advise him to sublimate his physiologic reactions, though the record indicates that not more than two per cent of the unmarried males completely achieve that theoretical ideal.”47
For such statements, among others, Kinsey was labeled a communist and moral subversive. The Indianapolis Roman Catholic Archdiocese claimed that Kinsey’s books “pave the way for people to believe in communism and to act like Communists.” A Bloomington newspaper headline read: KINSEY’s SEX BOOKS LABELED “RED” TAINTED. The publication Christianity and Crisis denounced the Kinsey report as “animalistic.”
Most telling was the fact that his Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, was even more controversial than the volume on males. The negative response came mostly from men, who were either shocked or threatened by Kinsey’s figures on pre- and extramarital intercourse, and especially the greater-than-expected range of female sexual response. A New York rabbi claimed it was “a libel on all womankind.” New York Congressman Louis B. Heller demanded complete censorship in a public letter to the postmaster general of the United States, followed by this statement: “He is hurling the insult of the century against our mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters under the pretext of making a great contribution to scientific research.”48 A special House Committee, charged with investigating projects funded by tax-exempt nonprofit foundations, was called in to put pressure on both Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation, the latter of which funded Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research. The investigation eventually led to the termination of his research funds in 1954. Kinsey died two years later, having never seen the remarkable change his project brought on science and society.49
What really got Kinsey in trouble was his acceptance of behavioral variation that excluded moral judgment. If moral species have no unchanging essence—no permanent and fixed typology by which to judge right and wrong behavior—then how can we derive an absolute ethical system? If morality is to be based on what people actually do, and what they do varies widely, then of what value is binary absolutism? Kinsey demonstrated that while “social forms, legal restrictions, and moral codes may be, as the social scientist would contend, the codification of human experience,” they are, like all statistical and population generalizations, “of little significance when applied to particular individuals.”50 The problem is that laws are constructed around unambiguous yeses and noes, but human behavior is a continuum, expansive in variation and individuality. In many ways, laws tell us more about the lawmakers than they do about the lawbreakers, as Kinsey concluded:
Prescriptions are merely public confessions of prescriptionists … . What is right for one individual may be wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a worthwhile part of the next individual’s life. The range of individual variation, in any particular case, is usually much greater than is generally understood. Some of the structural characters in my insects vary as much as twelve hundred percent. In some of the morphologic and physiologic characters which are basic to the human behavior which I am studying, the variation is a good twelve thousand percent. And yet social forms and moral codes are prescribed as though all individuals were identical; and we pass judgments, make awards, and heap penalties without regard to the diverse difficulties involved when such different people face uniform demands.51
Provisional ethics accommodates the range of individual variation found in human populations and suggests that we should pass judgments, make awards, and heap penalties only with regard to our great diversity. Such accommodational flexibility leads irrevocably toward greater tolerance, and more tolerance leads inexorably toward more peaceful ways of interacting with people, whether they are inside or outside of our group.
From Enmity to Amity: How the World Works
In modern state societies, methodological individualism and individual tolerance can only take us so far in our long-range goal of reaching the highest levels of the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid. Preserving the planet’s ecosystem and biodiversity and maximizing within-group amity and minimizing between-group enmity also require social and political action. The goals are too far reaching and the time frames involved are too long range for how we were programmed by nature to think. We evolved in a Paleolithic environment in which our concern for the environment and biodiversity was restricted to a few tens of miles and hundreds of species over the course of only a few decades. A global ecosystem and deep time was beyond anyone’s conception until the past half millennium, which is too short a time for evolution to create a global morality and deep-time ethic. Likewise, the number of people our ancestors encountered in their lifetime could be numbered in the hundreds, so there was no reason for evolution to have produced an ethnically diverse principle of tolerance. To save the planet and ourselves, we need a new morality that incorporates global biodiversity, human ethnicity, and deep time. Provisional ethics is one system of morality that attempts to do just that.
As a professional skeptic, I am often asked, incredulously, “Do you believe anything?” The question is absurd but understandable given the common misuse of the term as a synonym for “cynic” or “nonbeliever.” In fact, skeptics believe all sorts of things, not the least of which is the power of science to understand the natural world. If, by fiat, I had to reduce the theory of scientific provisionalism to four tenets, they would be as follows (in other words, this is what I believe):
1. Metaphysics: Provisional Reality.
2. Epistemology: Provisional Naturalism.
3. Ethics: Provisional Morality.
4. Politics: Provisional Libertarianism.
Provisional Reality and Provisional Naturalism. I believe that reality exi
sts over and above human and social constructions of that reality. Science as a method and naturalism as a philosophy together form the best tool we have for understanding that reality. Because science is cumulative—that is, it builds on itself in a progressive fashion—we can strive to achieve an ever-greater understanding of reality. Our knowledge of nature remains provisional because we can never know if we have final Truth. Because science is a human activity and nature is complex and dynamic, fuzzy logic and fractional probabilities best describe both nature and the estimations of our approximation toward understanding that nature. There is no such thing as the paranormal and the supernatural; there is only the normal and the natural and mysteries we have yet to explain. What separates science from all other human activities is its belief in the provisional nature of all conclusions. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is the heart of its limitation. It is also its greatest strength.
Provisional Morality. I believe that morality is the natural outcome of evolutionary and historical forces operating on both individuals and groups. The moral feelings of doing the right thing (such as virtuousness) or doing the wrong thing (such as guilt) were generated by nature as part of human evolution. Although cultures differ on what they define as right and wrong, the moral feelings of doing the right or wrong thing are universal to all humans. Human universals are pervasive and powerful, and include at their core the fact that we are, by nature, moral and immoral, good and evil, altruistic and selfish, cooperative and competitive, peaceful and bellicose, virtuous and nonvirtuous. Individuals and groups vary on the expression of such universal traits, but everyone has them. Most people most of the time in most circumstances are good and do the right thing for themselves and for others. But some people some of the time in some circumstances are bad and do the wrong thing for themselves and for others. As a consequence, moral principles are provisionally true, where they apply to most people, in most cultures, in most circumstances, most of the time. At some point in the last 10,000 years (around the time of writing and the shift from bands and tribes to chiefdoms and states), religions began to codify moral precepts into moral codes.
I believe that although we live in a determined universe and are governed by the laws of nature and forces of culture and history, because we can never know in its entirety the near-infinite causal net that determines our actions, we are free moral agents. And although there is no absolute and ultimate divinity to dole out rewards and punishments in some unspecified future, since moral principles are provisionally true for most people most of the time in most circumstances, provisional justice can be derived from individual responsibility and culpability through social and cultural beliefs, customs, mores, and laws that produce feelings of virtuousness and guilt and administer rewards and punishments. Since morality evolved as a trait of the species transcendent of any individual member of the species, moral provisionalism stands as a solid pillar between the permissiveness of moral relativism and the intolerance of moral absolutism.
I believe that we can discern the difference between right and wrong through three principles. (1) The ask first principle: to find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first. (2) The happiness principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness. (3) The liberty principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty. To implement social change, the moderation principle states that when innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and moderation in the protection of everything is no vice.
Provisional Libertarianism. I believe that humans are primarily driven to seek greater happiness, but the definition of such is personal and cannot be dictated and should not be controlled by any group. The free market is the best system yet devised for allowing the most individuals in the most places most of the time to achieve the most happiness. Individuals should take personal responsibility for their actions and buck up and quit whining when the slings and arrows of life take their toll. Libertarianism is provisional, however, because it is conditional and restricted. Before writing this book, I was an unabashed, unadulterated libertarian in favor of what is called anarcho-capitalism, a stateless society governed entirely by free markets and private contracts. I have since decided that such a society probably would not work, because the balance between the moral and immoral nature of humanity is too close. There are too many defectors and cheaters, too much greed and avarice. I could be wrong, but until the social experiment is run—an extensive free-market society is established and successfully operated for a century—I remain skeptical of extreme libertarianism. It sounds good in theory, but I am a scientist, not a philosopher; I prefer an empirical experiment to a thought experiment. We are dealing here with people, not atoms. Social experiments are always more complex than physical or biological experiments, where the unintended consequences of a minor change can cascade through the system to create major effects.
Where Goods Do Not Cross Frontiers, Armies Will
As discussed in chapter 3, one of the prime triggers of between-group violence is competition for scarce resources. There are rarely enough resources to support all individuals in all groups. Even if, at some given time, there were, such a condition could only be a temporary one because populations naturally tend to increase to the carrying capacity of the environment. Once that is exceeded, the demand for those resources will exceed the supply. Such was the condition throughout most of the Paleolithic for most peoples in most areas. The formula is simple: population abundance plus resource scarcity equals war. Thus, one way to decrease between-group violence is to increase the supply of resources to meet the demands of those in need of them. Nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat expressed this relationship thusly: “Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.”52
The indigenous peoples of New Guinea, whom Jared Diamond described as living in an almost constant state of between-group violence, in many areas have found peace. How did this happen? In the 1960s, Western colonial governments initially imposed peace on them, then ensured the peace by providing goods and supplies that they needed as well as the technologies to enable them to continue producing more resources. In less than one generation these same New Guineans were operating computers, flying planes, and running their own small businesses. In subsequent ethnographic studies, anthropologists discovered that, in many ways, these New Guineans were much happier living under colonial rule because the endemic wars were taking such a devastating physical and psychological toll.53 Where resources crossed New Guinea frontiers, New Guinea armies did not.
A similar case study can be found in the Yanomamö, the so-called fierce people. There is good reason for the moniker because, as we saw in our extensive discussion of them in chapter 3, warfare has long been a part of Yanomamö life. However, as missionaries in the area have discovered, the Yanomamö do not actually like fighting. When the missionaries (and, subsequently, the Venezuelan government to which their protected territories belong) provided food and the tools for the production and procurement of food, Yanomamö wars were significantly reduced. As Napoleon Chagnon discovered, however, even without outside intervention the Yanomamö are sophisticated traders as well as warriors. The reason is that trade creates alliances. If, as it is said, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” one of the primary means of protecting one’s group is to form alliances with other groups. Trade between groups is a powerful social adhesive (as is intervillage feasting, which they also do). One village cannot go to another village and announce that they are worried about being conquered by a third, more powerful village, since this would reveal weakness. Instead, “they conceal and subsume the true motive for the alliance in the vehicles of trading and feasting, developing these institutions over months and even years. In this manner they retain an apparent
modicum of sovereignty and pride, while simultaneously attaining the ultimate objectives: intervillage solidarity and military interdependence.”
Chagnon found that his charges purposefully designed a division of labor within villages in order to generate trade between villages. “Each village has one or more special products that it provides to its allies. These include items such as dogs, hallucinogenic drugs (both cultivated and collected), arrow points, arrow shafts, bows, cotton yarn, cotton and vine hammocks, baskets of several varieties, clay pots, and, in the case of contacted villages, steel tools, fishhooks, fishline, and aluminum pots.” Although, in principle, each Yanomamö group could produce its own goods for survival, in fact, they don’t; they set up a division of labor and system of trade. They do this, says Chagnon, not because they are nascent capitalists, but because they want to form political alliances with other groups, and trade is an effective means of so doing. “Without these frequent contacts with neighbors, alliances would be much slower in formation and would be even more unstable once formed. A prerequisite to stable alliance is repetitive visiting and feasting, and the trading mechanism serves to bring about these visits.”54 Where goods cross Yanomamö frontiers, Yanomamö armies do not.
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