In 2010, Martin Nowak collaborated with biologist Edward O. Wilson (see previous post) and mathematician Corina Tarnita in publishing an article in Nature entitled "The Evolution of Eusociality." The following year, Nowak followed the Nature article with SuperCooperators; two-years later, Wilson followed the Nature article with The Social Conquest of the Earth. The cornerstone of the Nature article was its criticism of the inclusive fitness theory, developed by William Hamilton and others, that became the mathematical foundation of kin selection in evolutionary analysis. Kin selection theory became the basis on which the presence of altruistic behavior in nature, a phenomenon noted by Darwin in The Origin of Species, could be explained in evolutionary terms. One would have thought from the Nature article that Nowak and Wilson were on the same page in terms of their analysis of evolution and cooperation, but the fact that they wrote separate follow-on books reveals significant differences. While Wilson creates controversy by announcing that he finds little additional value in kin selection theory for evolutionary analysis, Nowak acknowledges the detractors that responded to the Nature article and concludes that kin selection still has some explanatory value.
The discussion of group selection theory and multilevel selection with respect to the social insects in The Social Conquest of the Earth closely follows the summary of "a full theory of eusocial evolution" in the Nature article: "We suggest . . . the following may be recognized: (1) the formation of groups. (2) The occurrence of a minimum and necessary combination of pre-adaptive traits, causing the groups to be tightly formed. In animals at least, the combination includes a valuable and defensible nest. (3) The appearance of mutations that prescribe the persistence of the group, most likely by the silencing of dispersal behavior. Evidently, a durable nest remains a key element in maintaining the prevalence. Primitive eusociality may emerge immediately due to spring-loaded pre-adaptations. (4) Emergent traits caused by the interaction of group members are shaped through natural selection by environmental forces. (5) Multilevel selection drives changes in the colony life cycle and social structures, often to elaborate extremes. *** We have not addressed the evolution of human social behavior here, but parallels with the scenarios of animal eusocial evolution exist, and they are, we believe, well worth examining."
In their separate books, both Wilson and Nowak address "the evolution of human social behavior" not addressed in the Nature article, but they take divergent paths. Wilson starts to head down a path I wish he had developed further. To determine what evolved that made us humans, he begins by asking "What is human nature?" He suggests that the place to look is "in the rules of development prescribed by genes, through which the universals of culture are created." Human nature, he says, is the "inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are epigenetic rules, which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory. These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make. . . They determine the individuals we as a rule find sexually most attractive. They lead us differentially to acquire fears and phobias concerning dangers in the environment, as from snakes and heights, to communicate with certain facial expressions and forms of body language, to bond with infants; to bond conjugally; and so on across the wide range of other categories of behavior and thought." This is an important statement, but Wilson does not flesh it out, and he trips when he adds, "the rules of physiological development are not genetically hardwired." As Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, The New Science of Evo-Devo explains, the developmental processes of different organisms are genetically determined, including the post-natal development of the organism, which in the case of humans goes on for many years. Wilson is simply wrong when he says that physiological development is "not beyond conscious control, like 'automatic' behaviors of heartbeat and breathing." He is wrong when he suggests that physiological development is completely "learned." Yes, there is a point when learning and culture become more influential, but as early (infant) child development research reports, the earliest form of social communication, mimicry, is instinctive, and it is not learned.
Wilson's reference to "physiological development" may simply be semantical error. Physiology broadly refers to "a branch of biology that deals with the functions and activities of life or of living matter (as organs, tissues, or cells) and of the physical and chemical phenomena involved—compare anatomy, morphology." Sean Carroll's discussion of evolutionary developmental biology focused primarily on morphology, although physiology is understood in its broader context as applicable to everything about living matter that has a genetic correlate. That would include the human brain and the neurosensory system. Wilson is thinking about something different than physiology. He is contemplating behavioral epigenetics, and refers to our innate predispositions to learn and make one choice over another. This is why understanding the human brain and the neurosensory system that feeds the human brain is critical to understanding human nature. Nor surprisingly, many posts on this blog are devoted to this understanding. Specifically, human behavior is not genetically determined, as social insect behavior might be genetically determined, but our nature has effectively set us up to receive information (learning, culture) in such a way that is more likely to cause us to behave one way rather than another. An example of this "predisposition" includes incest avoidance; we have a "bias" against sexual relations with those we have grown up in the same household.
In terms of social behavior, as I previously mentioned in the prior post I do not think we can understate the role of human memory --- unique in the animal kingdom --- in the evolution of culture. I also do not think we can understate the role of feelings and emotions either, and my surmise is that there is more than a predisposition here: human feelings and emotions are hardwired, and they likely contribute substantially to a number of our biases and predispositions. For example, feelings such as blushing are associated with social emotions such as shame and embarrassment. These emotions are universal among normal humans. It is surmised that blushing may have evolved as a means of avoiding conflict by reducing the possibility of deception. The person who witnesses another blush knows the reaction is authentic and that the person acknowledges he is troubled by what has happened. Disgust is another social emotion, likely to have evolved as a part of a physical response to offensive foods, is universal among normal humans. Wilson only briefly alludes to these basic social emotions, but significantly culture has evolved to exploit these emotions so the emotion can be triggered differently among different cultures. Nudity, for example, may trigger blushing in one culture,and no response in another. Fear, which Wilson briefly discusses, is another emotional response that has consequences for social behavior, is also exploited by culture. Feeling and emotion are central components of a biologically based understanding of morality, altruism and cooperative behavior. These emotions are also related to facial expressions that builds cooperative bonds, as observed by Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner and reported in the discussion of Keltner's Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (see July 16, 2010 post):
"'Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships,' Keltner says. Emotions are communicated through several sensory means: visually through facial expressions, which Keltner documents based on his own research and that of his teacher and mentor, Paul Ekman, explaining how muscles in the face are linked to and controlled by neural pathways in the brain that make them reliable indicators of emotion. In facial expression, we recognize embarrassment, which signals our moral sense of wrongdoing and respect for the judgment of others. In facial expression, the smile signals friendly intent and affection among peers and movement toward cooperation and intimacy. In facial expression, laughter triggers mirror neurons in the brains of others that builds cooperative bonds between one who laughs and the other who hears the laugh. Keltner tells us that teasing is not the same as bullying, and is a type of playful communication designed to ferret out another's commitments that bolsters social life. Emotions are communicated through touch, and the skin, our largest sensory organ, evolved to be an important part of social communication among humans and their predecessors."
Emotions also shape our reasoning, undermining the notion that we are purely rational animals.
(See April 8, 2011 post):
"Hume's treatment of emotions is not radically different than Damasio's, because Hume's catalog of emotions largely fall under the label of what Damasio refers to as the 'social emotions,' which Damasio believes are of recent evolutionary vintage, some of which may be exclusively human. For both Hume and Damasio, emotions shape our reasoning: 'rational' choice, if you will, is not independent of or from emotions and feelings. Compassion (empathy/sympathy) is one of those social emotions, and compassion, along with admiration, is critical in building a social construct in Damasio's view. And so it is with Hume, as Part III (On The Morals) states that sympathy with public interest is the source of moral approbation, and ultimately reciprocal promise-making behavior and principles of justice: 'sympathy is a very powerful principle in human nature, that it has great influence on our taste of beauty, and that it produces our sentiment of morals in all the artificial virtues.'"
Nowak, in contrast, is less concerned with the biological basis of social behavior, and he is more concerned with the conditions that make social cooperation more likely or less likely than not, and whether those conditions can be mathematically modeled (a game theoretic approach) and tested. Nowak finds that there are five "mechanisms" that explain whether social behavior is a likely trait that overcomes natural selection's inherent tendency to favor the individual pursuit of self-interest (cheating, defection). "[N]atural selection favors defectors [over cooperators] . . cooperators have a lower fitness than defectors in a well-mixed population. As a consequence, as that population evolves, natural selection slowly increases the abundance of defectors until every last one has been exterminated. This is the 'wrong' outcome, because a population of cooperators has a higher productivity (higher average fitness) than a population of defectors. Hence, in this particular case natural selection does not achieve the highest fitness but actually destroys what would be best for the entire population. To favor cooperation, natural selection needs help. It needs mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation. . . My work show how cooperation arises out of competition, even though the two are locked together in ceaseless conflict. The collective effort of society depends in part on suppressing the ability of the individual to mutiny and defect. The same goes for rebellious cells, chromosomes, and genes. Like day and night, or good and bad, cooperation and competition are forever entwined in a tight embrace."
The first of the five mechanisms of cooperation is direct reciprocity (backscratching) arising out of repetitive interaction. I will do a favor for another because I expect to encounter that person again and he will repay the favor. The second mechanism is indirect reciprocity, a reference to the reputation of the person or group (I will do you a favor, and by my reputation someone else will do me a favor). This type of reciprocity occurs without direct contact. The other person may be on another side of town or on the other side of the world. Indirect reciprocity relies heavily on communication to establish a reputation and language capacity is therefore important. The third mechanism is spatial selection, where natural selection favors individuals who form networks that help each other. The fourth mechanism is multilevel selection, where natural selection favors groups who are more successful in cooperating than other groups. The fifth mechanism is kin selection. With these five mechanisms of cooperation, "natural selection ensures that we are able to get more from social living than from the pursuit of a solitary, selfish life."
According to Nowak, what makes humans unique is that we are the only species on Earth that draws support from all five mechanisms of cooperation. We are the only species that "can summon the full power of indirect reciprocity, thanks to our rich and flexible language." That makes us "supercooperators." He adds, "We are now subject to an evolutionary dynamic that can detach itself to some degree from its genetic basis, from chemistry, genes, and DNA. This is cultural evolution, which involves learning, and explains why we are so devastatingly successful. As a result, the way the human brain evolves is utterly different from the evolution of any other biological structure that has ever existed. The architecture of the brain changes every time we talk to another person. We are able, in turn, to impose structural changes on the way the listener's brain is wired. The next time you listen to another person, remember that you have permanently changed the wiring of your brain and will do this every time you memorize a moment, no matter how fleeting." This remark recalls the discussion of how fragile memory is in the September 20, 2011 post discussing Daniel Schacter's The Seven Deadly Sins of Memory. Equally, however, Nowak demonstrates that notwithstanding a different attitude toward kin selection theory, he really is on the same page with Edward Wilson. "I do not restrict the use the term 'natural selection' to genes alone. Depending on whether we talk about cells, animals, or people, reproduction can be genetic or cultural." If we are speaking in terms of the fact that everything in life is reducible to a unit of information, I would agree that culture can be transmitted. (See August 15, 2011 post, August 17, 2009 post). And yes, cultures can die and disappear as a result of changes in the environment, as we saw in Jared Diamond's Collapse (see August 12, 2012 post), and Nowak echoes Diamond's concerns when he express concerns about "mankind teetering on the brink of several possible catastrophes of its own making," including nuclear conflagration and the ultimate "Tragedy of the Commons," global warming, which he believes will force humans to enter a new chapter of cooperation. The question, of course, is how long will take for humans to establish that level of consensus (see August 12, 2012 post). But I would echo Frans DeWaal: evolving culture in humans will not contradict what has evolved biologically, it will only support what evolved biologically.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012)
We tend to think of evolution in terms of a struggle, a "competitive struggle" in which natural selection favors certain genes, or a collection of genes in a particular organism for continued reproduction and survival. It is adaptation, however, not necessarily competition, that explains survival, and evolutionary theorists commonly explain adaptation in terms of self-interest. In Richard Dawkins' view, for example, genes are "selfish." In nature, however, evolution has favored a rare condition, "eusociality" in a handful of species, who in many respects have come to dominate the earth. As described by biologist Edward O. Wilson, eusociality refers to the "condition of multiple generations organized into groups by means of altruistic division of labor." The social insects --- wasps, ants, termites, bees, and a small number of other insect species --- are the most prominent examples of eusociality. The biomass of ants, for example, exceeds over half of all insects as well as the biomass of all non-human terrestrial vertebrates. Another prominent example, yet very different from the social insect, is the homo sapien.
Eusociality is characterized by a high level of cooperation, but it is important to note that cooperation is only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for eusociality. We can think of many other examples in the animal kingdom, including symbiosis, multiple forms of reciprocal behavior, parenting, that do not rise to "multiple generations organized into groups by means of an altruistic division of labor." The definition of eusociality is a tight definition; it is not intended to capture all cooperative behavior in the animal kingdom that might be deemed "social." Eusociality does not describe herds, packs, dens, prides, or other groups animals who exhibit social behavior, because their social condition is not composed of multiple generations or their means of organization does not constitute an altruistic division of labor. Our closest living species, the chimpanzee, who exhibits social behavior (see November 9, 2010 post and June 17, 2010 post) is not considered eusocial.
In the world of social insects, the group is organized around the nest (or hive). In all of the examples of species that have attained eusociality, altruistic cooperation, says Wilson, protects a "persistent, defensible nest from its enemies, whether predators, parasites, or competitors," which sets the stage for members of a group belonging to more than one generation to divide labor in a way that sacrifices at least some of their selfish interests to the group. Importantly, multiple generations within the nest stay with the nest. They do not disperse.
While it is not yet proven, Wilson believes that eusociality in the social insects is genetically driven by a gene that silences the insect brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests, allowing natural selection on the rest of the genome to effectuate more complex forms of social organization. This occurs, says Wilson, because natural selection impacts not only the genotype (gene selection), but it also operates on groups within a species as well (group selection). This is the multi-level selection thesis previously discussed in the prior posting on Holldobler and Wilson's Superorganism (see November 4, 2009 post). The new twist in The Social Conquest of Earth is Wilson's declaration that kin selection, a form of group selection, can no longer be defended because its mathematical underpinning, inclusive fitness theory, had been debunked in a 2010 article co-authored by Wilson, Corina Tarnita, and Martin Nowak. The work of Bill Hamilton and George Price (see October 13, 2010 post), he contends, no longer contributes much to evolutionary analysis.
While multilevel selection remains a significant storyline in The Social Conquest of Earth, the biology of eusocial insects is merely a starting point for the discussion here. Wilson's focus is the homo sapien, humanity, and human nature, explaining his views of how eusociality evolved in homo sapiens. In contrast to the social insects, humans do not congregate in a nest. In contrast to the social insects, humans do disperse. But humans do build and maintain social communities comprised of multiple generations and, Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees notwithstanding (see January 30, 2010 post), humans are organized into groups by altruistic division of labor. For Wilson, the social evolution of humans is not attributable to a single or "major" event such as the development of enlarged brains or bi-pedal mobility, but can only be understood in terms of prehuman adaptations in ancient species and adaptations that distinguish humans from other hominids, evidence from human archaeology, and the co-evolution of human culture, all of which have come to define "human nature." Wilson is a proponent of the "dual inheritance theory." For Wilson, a key event in human history is technological: the mastery of fire. With the ability to control fire, campfires are created and the campfire, in Wilson's view, is the homo sapiens' counterpart of the insect nest. Campfires are the venue that facilitates the sharing of food, and this is the magnet that draws homo sapiens into a cooperative environment.
In my November 4, 2009 post, I commented on Holldobler and Wilson's discussion of multilevel selection as follows: "However powerful the evidence for the superorganism is and the multilevel selection model, the truth remains that the critical unit of evolution is the gene." I made have overstated the uniqueness of the gene in making this statement and uninentionally sublimated the individual: after all, it is the individual (a collection of genes) that reproduces. A comment I made in the November 9, 2010 post discussing Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy seems extremely relevant: "Our capacity for cooperation, altruism, and other social instincts is certainly biological, and it is a product of evolution. We have much to learn about what makes us human from learning about the behavior of other species from which humans evolved as we do from observing our own behavior. This is De Waal's primary thesis. And this thesis is no stranger to this blog and previous posts, including De Waal's own The Ape and the Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post), Dacher Keltner's Born to Be Good (July 16, 2010 post), Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (November 4, 2009 post), Michael Gazzaniga's Human (September 27, 2009), Marco Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), and Christine Kennealy's The First Word (August 31, 2009 post)." Natural selection operates on what is biological or chemical; while culture undeniably "evolves," natural selection as we understand it does not operate upon culture. If culture is going to be successful, it is because it supports what natural selection favors. As Frans DeWaal explains in the The Ape and The Sushi Master: "Although the relation between culture and nature can be tense, culture mostly tries to get along with nature." Culture cannot change nature; culture can evolve behavior to act consistently with nature. For example, the incest taboo - an avoidance of sex among family members, long a cultural regulation, is now known to be a form of behavior in the primate world that appears to be innate in some aspects (an aversion rather than an avoidance) and perhaps learned in other respect. (See June 17, 2010 post)." Group selection and multilevel selection are not settled theories, and Wilson's rejection of kin selection is contested by others in the field.
Wilson's discussion of "group selection" suggests that evolution operates at the level of a group within a species. Thus a "group" might be a nation or a religious group or an ethnic group in the case of humans, and here I part company with Wilson . These are cultural groups, and natural selection does not operate upon culture. When I thought about how I would respond to Wilson's discussion here, I realized I had already said in my discussions of Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy (November 9, 2010 post) and The Ape and the Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post) what I want to say (and what DeWaals has to say) about the linkage between genes and culture in those posts. Here is a snippet from the June 17, 2010 post:
"Culture and genetics have one thing in common --- the transmission of information: in the case of genetics information is transmitted by biological/chemical means, in the case of culture it is transmitted by social means. 'This is not to say that both forms of behavioral inheritance --- the one traveling across time via genotypes, the other via phenotypes --- should not or could not be conceptually linked. Ironically, the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited has found its realization not in the physical characteristics he was thinking of, but in behavior. Genetic predispositions feed into culture, culture affects survival, and survival and reproduction determine which genotypes spread in the population. In other words, there exists a dauntingly complex interplay between genetic and cultural transmission. Brave and inspiring attempts at a theory of dual inheritance, or co evolution, have been made, without, however, in any way confusing the two processes.'" Wilson confuses the two processes. I would have liked to see in his discussion of human evolution and our predisposition to social behavior a more biologically-based discussion of the neurological system and human child development, such as that in the November 9, 2010 post about The Age of Empathy:
"At the biological core of our humanness is the limbic system, which, from an evolutionary perspective, is one of the oldest parts of our neural network in the human brain. It is a part of the brains of other species as well. Antonio Damassio identifies the limbic system as a critical regulator of feelings and emotions in The Feeling of What Happens, and it is central to understanding human consciousness. De Waal says the limbic system allows emotions such as affection and pleasure, and paved the way for family life, friendships, and other caring relationships. Other parts of our neural network allow us to store memories of these feelings and emotions and allow us to recall the context in which we previously experienced them and then to "understand" them. A key line here is De Waal's statement, "Bodily connections come first --- understanding follows." Mirror neurons, as described in Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), are active in these other parts of the neural network known as the brain that allow us to "read" the minds of others, enabling us to connect with others, and facilitate the the experience we call empathy. "De Waal calls this emotional contagion: seeing another's emotions arouses our own emotions, and then we build "a more advanced understanding of another's situation." Later, he adds, "Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need."
"True to his dualism, just as De Waal recognizes that emotional contagion probably starts immediately with the mother-child relationship and that early communication fosters a bond, a second phase begins just months later in the course of child development when the child begins to develop a sense of self. And empathy, De Waal believes, "requires both mental mirroring and mental separation." The former occurs when we see another person in a particular emotional state. The latter occurs when we parse our own emotional state from the other, and this allows us to "pinpoint the actual source of our own feelings." De Waal attributes our dualism to the existence of VEN cells in the brain --- Von Economo neurons --- that differ from other neurons and are unique to humans and their recent ancestors. Physically, VEN cells are long and spindle-like and reach deeper into the brain. Research shows that when parts of the human brain that contain these cells are damaged, behavior is marked by a loss of perspective-taking, empathy, embarrassment, and future orientation. Besides humans and certain apes, these cells are also found in dolphins, whales, and elephants, where behavioral research shows they have the capacity for empathy that is not found in other species."
Some of this is touched upon by Wilson, but what is touched upon deserves elaboration and much is missing from The Social Conquest of Earth. Yet these biological attributes of homo sapiens are the products of natural selection in humans and they specifically relate to our ability to act cooperatively and altruistically: the neurobiology behind feelings and emotions (see April 8, 2011 post), the neurobiology behind memory (see April 8, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post, and September 20, 2011 post), the neurobiology behind our sensory system and our ability to communicate and our capacity for storytelling (see October 25, 2011 post, September 27, 2009 post, and August 31, 2009 post), and the biology of human development. For example, we cannot underestimate the role of human memory (including the failings of memory, see September 20, 2011 post) in evolving a human culture, and several prior posts have addressed this subject in one way or the another. (See September 28, 2010 post, September 9, 2010 post, and August 15, 2011 post) Wilson merely summarizes these attributes when he notes:
"What catapulted Home sapiens to this level? Experts on the subject agree that increased long-term memory, expecially that put into working memory, and with it an ability to construct scenarios and plan strategy in brief periods of time, played the key role in Europe and elsewhere, both before the African breakout and afterward. What was the driving force that led to the threshold of complex culture? It appears to have been group selection. A group with members who could read intentions and cooperate among themselves while predicting the actions of competing groups, would have an enormous advantage over others less gifted. . . Morality, conformity, religious fervor, and fighting ability combined with imagination and memory to produce the winner."
These are the human attributes that are genetically determined by evolution, and they are the biological basis of humanity. Our social instincts are derived from these biological attributes.
Notwithstanding my conclusion that much is missing from The Social Conquest of the Earth, Wilson's discussion of the origins of religion and organized religion and the origins of the creative arts are brilliant. These subjects too have been the topics of prior posts. (See January 14, 2012 post, February 4, 2012 post, February 15, 2012 post, and June 12, 2011 post).
Eusociality is characterized by a high level of cooperation, but it is important to note that cooperation is only a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for eusociality. We can think of many other examples in the animal kingdom, including symbiosis, multiple forms of reciprocal behavior, parenting, that do not rise to "multiple generations organized into groups by means of an altruistic division of labor." The definition of eusociality is a tight definition; it is not intended to capture all cooperative behavior in the animal kingdom that might be deemed "social." Eusociality does not describe herds, packs, dens, prides, or other groups animals who exhibit social behavior, because their social condition is not composed of multiple generations or their means of organization does not constitute an altruistic division of labor. Our closest living species, the chimpanzee, who exhibits social behavior (see November 9, 2010 post and June 17, 2010 post) is not considered eusocial.
In the world of social insects, the group is organized around the nest (or hive). In all of the examples of species that have attained eusociality, altruistic cooperation, says Wilson, protects a "persistent, defensible nest from its enemies, whether predators, parasites, or competitors," which sets the stage for members of a group belonging to more than one generation to divide labor in a way that sacrifices at least some of their selfish interests to the group. Importantly, multiple generations within the nest stay with the nest. They do not disperse.
While it is not yet proven, Wilson believes that eusociality in the social insects is genetically driven by a gene that silences the insect brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests, allowing natural selection on the rest of the genome to effectuate more complex forms of social organization. This occurs, says Wilson, because natural selection impacts not only the genotype (gene selection), but it also operates on groups within a species as well (group selection). This is the multi-level selection thesis previously discussed in the prior posting on Holldobler and Wilson's Superorganism (see November 4, 2009 post). The new twist in The Social Conquest of Earth is Wilson's declaration that kin selection, a form of group selection, can no longer be defended because its mathematical underpinning, inclusive fitness theory, had been debunked in a 2010 article co-authored by Wilson, Corina Tarnita, and Martin Nowak. The work of Bill Hamilton and George Price (see October 13, 2010 post), he contends, no longer contributes much to evolutionary analysis.
While multilevel selection remains a significant storyline in The Social Conquest of Earth, the biology of eusocial insects is merely a starting point for the discussion here. Wilson's focus is the homo sapien, humanity, and human nature, explaining his views of how eusociality evolved in homo sapiens. In contrast to the social insects, humans do not congregate in a nest. In contrast to the social insects, humans do disperse. But humans do build and maintain social communities comprised of multiple generations and, Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees notwithstanding (see January 30, 2010 post), humans are organized into groups by altruistic division of labor. For Wilson, the social evolution of humans is not attributable to a single or "major" event such as the development of enlarged brains or bi-pedal mobility, but can only be understood in terms of prehuman adaptations in ancient species and adaptations that distinguish humans from other hominids, evidence from human archaeology, and the co-evolution of human culture, all of which have come to define "human nature." Wilson is a proponent of the "dual inheritance theory." For Wilson, a key event in human history is technological: the mastery of fire. With the ability to control fire, campfires are created and the campfire, in Wilson's view, is the homo sapiens' counterpart of the insect nest. Campfires are the venue that facilitates the sharing of food, and this is the magnet that draws homo sapiens into a cooperative environment.
In my November 4, 2009 post, I commented on Holldobler and Wilson's discussion of multilevel selection as follows: "However powerful the evidence for the superorganism is and the multilevel selection model, the truth remains that the critical unit of evolution is the gene." I made have overstated the uniqueness of the gene in making this statement and uninentionally sublimated the individual: after all, it is the individual (a collection of genes) that reproduces. A comment I made in the November 9, 2010 post discussing Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy seems extremely relevant: "Our capacity for cooperation, altruism, and other social instincts is certainly biological, and it is a product of evolution. We have much to learn about what makes us human from learning about the behavior of other species from which humans evolved as we do from observing our own behavior. This is De Waal's primary thesis. And this thesis is no stranger to this blog and previous posts, including De Waal's own The Ape and the Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post), Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism (October 13, 2010 post), Dacher Keltner's Born to Be Good (July 16, 2010 post), Holldobler and Wilson's The Superorganism (November 4, 2009 post), Michael Gazzaniga's Human (September 27, 2009), Marco Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), and Christine Kennealy's The First Word (August 31, 2009 post)." Natural selection operates on what is biological or chemical; while culture undeniably "evolves," natural selection as we understand it does not operate upon culture. If culture is going to be successful, it is because it supports what natural selection favors. As Frans DeWaal explains in the The Ape and The Sushi Master: "Although the relation between culture and nature can be tense, culture mostly tries to get along with nature." Culture cannot change nature; culture can evolve behavior to act consistently with nature. For example, the incest taboo - an avoidance of sex among family members, long a cultural regulation, is now known to be a form of behavior in the primate world that appears to be innate in some aspects (an aversion rather than an avoidance) and perhaps learned in other respect. (See June 17, 2010 post)." Group selection and multilevel selection are not settled theories, and Wilson's rejection of kin selection is contested by others in the field.
Wilson's discussion of "group selection" suggests that evolution operates at the level of a group within a species. Thus a "group" might be a nation or a religious group or an ethnic group in the case of humans, and here I part company with Wilson . These are cultural groups, and natural selection does not operate upon culture. When I thought about how I would respond to Wilson's discussion here, I realized I had already said in my discussions of Frans DeWaal's The Age of Empathy (November 9, 2010 post) and The Ape and the Sushi Master (June 17, 2010 post) what I want to say (and what DeWaals has to say) about the linkage between genes and culture in those posts. Here is a snippet from the June 17, 2010 post:
"Culture and genetics have one thing in common --- the transmission of information: in the case of genetics information is transmitted by biological/chemical means, in the case of culture it is transmitted by social means. 'This is not to say that both forms of behavioral inheritance --- the one traveling across time via genotypes, the other via phenotypes --- should not or could not be conceptually linked. Ironically, the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited has found its realization not in the physical characteristics he was thinking of, but in behavior. Genetic predispositions feed into culture, culture affects survival, and survival and reproduction determine which genotypes spread in the population. In other words, there exists a dauntingly complex interplay between genetic and cultural transmission. Brave and inspiring attempts at a theory of dual inheritance, or co evolution, have been made, without, however, in any way confusing the two processes.'" Wilson confuses the two processes. I would have liked to see in his discussion of human evolution and our predisposition to social behavior a more biologically-based discussion of the neurological system and human child development, such as that in the November 9, 2010 post about The Age of Empathy:
"At the biological core of our humanness is the limbic system, which, from an evolutionary perspective, is one of the oldest parts of our neural network in the human brain. It is a part of the brains of other species as well. Antonio Damassio identifies the limbic system as a critical regulator of feelings and emotions in The Feeling of What Happens, and it is central to understanding human consciousness. De Waal says the limbic system allows emotions such as affection and pleasure, and paved the way for family life, friendships, and other caring relationships. Other parts of our neural network allow us to store memories of these feelings and emotions and allow us to recall the context in which we previously experienced them and then to "understand" them. A key line here is De Waal's statement, "Bodily connections come first --- understanding follows." Mirror neurons, as described in Iacobonni's Mirroring People (September 18, 2009 post), are active in these other parts of the neural network known as the brain that allow us to "read" the minds of others, enabling us to connect with others, and facilitate the the experience we call empathy. "De Waal calls this emotional contagion: seeing another's emotions arouses our own emotions, and then we build "a more advanced understanding of another's situation." Later, he adds, "Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need."
"True to his dualism, just as De Waal recognizes that emotional contagion probably starts immediately with the mother-child relationship and that early communication fosters a bond, a second phase begins just months later in the course of child development when the child begins to develop a sense of self. And empathy, De Waal believes, "requires both mental mirroring and mental separation." The former occurs when we see another person in a particular emotional state. The latter occurs when we parse our own emotional state from the other, and this allows us to "pinpoint the actual source of our own feelings." De Waal attributes our dualism to the existence of VEN cells in the brain --- Von Economo neurons --- that differ from other neurons and are unique to humans and their recent ancestors. Physically, VEN cells are long and spindle-like and reach deeper into the brain. Research shows that when parts of the human brain that contain these cells are damaged, behavior is marked by a loss of perspective-taking, empathy, embarrassment, and future orientation. Besides humans and certain apes, these cells are also found in dolphins, whales, and elephants, where behavioral research shows they have the capacity for empathy that is not found in other species."
Some of this is touched upon by Wilson, but what is touched upon deserves elaboration and much is missing from The Social Conquest of Earth. Yet these biological attributes of homo sapiens are the products of natural selection in humans and they specifically relate to our ability to act cooperatively and altruistically: the neurobiology behind feelings and emotions (see April 8, 2011 post), the neurobiology behind memory (see April 8, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post, and September 20, 2011 post), the neurobiology behind our sensory system and our ability to communicate and our capacity for storytelling (see October 25, 2011 post, September 27, 2009 post, and August 31, 2009 post), and the biology of human development. For example, we cannot underestimate the role of human memory (including the failings of memory, see September 20, 2011 post) in evolving a human culture, and several prior posts have addressed this subject in one way or the another. (See September 28, 2010 post, September 9, 2010 post, and August 15, 2011 post) Wilson merely summarizes these attributes when he notes:
"What catapulted Home sapiens to this level? Experts on the subject agree that increased long-term memory, expecially that put into working memory, and with it an ability to construct scenarios and plan strategy in brief periods of time, played the key role in Europe and elsewhere, both before the African breakout and afterward. What was the driving force that led to the threshold of complex culture? It appears to have been group selection. A group with members who could read intentions and cooperate among themselves while predicting the actions of competing groups, would have an enormous advantage over others less gifted. . . Morality, conformity, religious fervor, and fighting ability combined with imagination and memory to produce the winner."
These are the human attributes that are genetically determined by evolution, and they are the biological basis of humanity. Our social instincts are derived from these biological attributes.
Notwithstanding my conclusion that much is missing from The Social Conquest of the Earth, Wilson's discussion of the origins of religion and organized religion and the origins of the creative arts are brilliant. These subjects too have been the topics of prior posts. (See January 14, 2012 post, February 4, 2012 post, February 15, 2012 post, and June 12, 2011 post).
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Jared Diamond, Collapse (2005)
In a recently published paper entitled Perception of Climate Change, James Hansen of NASA and others observed, "The greatest barrier to public recognition of human-made climate change is probably the natural variability of local climate. How can a person discern long-term climate change," the authors asked, "given the notorious variability of local weather and climate from day to day and year to year?" The question assumed "great practical importance," they wrote, because "actions to stem emissions of the gases that cause global warming are unlikely to approach what is needed until the public recognizes that human-made climate change is underway and perceives that it will have unacceptable consequences if effective action are not taken to slow the climate change."
The public is widely divided over the veracity of Hansen's assertion that there are "gases that cause global warming" or that human activity causes global warming. While polls show that most of the public believes that global temperatures are higher now than they were in recent memory, there is no consensus over why that is the case. Hansen, and quite frankly a large number of scientists who actually study the issue, believes the cause is anthropogenic: burning fossil fuels results in increased emissions of carbon dioxide, which cannot be completely absorbed by the earth, leading to rising temperatures because the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs infrared radiation emitted when sunlight strikes the earth. While some skeptics of the claim that humans are responsible for rising temperatures are changing their minds after taking the time to actually look at the data, the lack of public consensus, even polarization, has led to a stalemate in the development of public policy and an action to address the issue. Those who deny an anthropogenic cause for rising global temperatures have successfully blocked public decision-making. It also has not helped decision-making that poor economic conditions have frozen public-decision making because of fears that short-term economic self-interests will be prejudiced and a troubled economy will be made even more troubled. Everyone, regardless of whether or not they subscribe to the anthropogenic causation view, recognizes that the cost of changing individual and collective behavior to extract and consume fewer fossil fuels, control emissions, and change economic infrastructure accordingly is extremely expensive.
Prior posts in this blog have alluded to the individual economic actor acting in his or her self-interest to maximize their individual welfare (see January 30, 2010 post ), and their behavior is typically called "rational." And it has been a central tenet of western economic philosophy that the aggregation of the self-interested decisions of these thousands and millions and billions of individual economic actors maximizes the welfare of the group, society, nation or humanity as a whole. Western philosophy has historically exalted the individual (see September 18, 2009 post), yet there is a growing body of recognition that human nature is more fundamentally social and our social philosophy needs to align itself more closely to our biological nature. (Id., see also November 9, 2010 post and July 16, 2010 post and October 13, 2010 post and January 21, 2011 post).
There is a long line of literature that refuses to the subscribe to the view that social or group welfare is maximized by the aggregate outcome of individual, self-interested decisions. Marxism is one notable philosophy that distinguished itself on that view. Marxism ultimately failed as a social philosophy because it coercively suppressed individual decision-making that could and actually would enhance group welfare. Still, it is well-documented that "rational" individual decisions can lead to undesirable outcomes for the group, society, nation, or even humanity. The tragedy of the commons is but one concept that articulates this observation. As I was beginning to write this post, the tragedy of the commons came to mind while I was watching the current Governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, introduce Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney at a political event in Norfolk, Virginia, and several times McDonnell remarked on "our god-given natural resources" as though extraction of natural resources off the coast of Virginia was a natural right that ought to be exempt from public decision-making. McDonnell may not have intended his statement in exactly that way, but the tone and political rhetoric conveyed that view. But this rhetoric is short-sighted, and frankly there are a large number of businesses today whose business models recognize it is shortsighted as well. The beverage and forest product industries are just a couple of examples. The tragedy of the commons recognizes that there are shared resources and sometimes there are multiple shared resources in the same place that compete for individual attention and individual exploitation of those shared resources can have unsustainable outcomes. The simplest example of this thesis is the pasture land exploited by a group of cattlemen or sheepherders, as shown in this video. A more complex scenario exists where we find shared resources located in the same place; for example, minerals or petroleum in the ocean or in a virgin forest stand. The challenge for public policy makers in these circumstances is not to stand on a soap box and complain about restraints on "god given" natural resources rights, but is to make good "rational" decisions that strike right balance between incentivizing (including not penalizing) individual and independent behavior and the public good.
The tragedy of the commons is a concept that underlies Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. At the core of Collapse is a series of examples that arguably represent failures of group decision-making. Diamond is focusing on ecological collapse and he identifies five factors contributing to the collapse: 1) environmental damage (pollution, deforestation), 2) climate change (drought, temperature), 3) hostile neighbors (overpopulation), (4) friendly trade partners, and (5) society's response to the problem. Diamond's challenge is to explain why his examples of societal and ecological collapse, some of which are probably obscure to most of the public --- Easter Island and its vanished forest, deforestation and overpopulation in the Pitcairn group of islands, deforestation and drought in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico that led to the disappearance of the Anasazi, the collapse of the Maya in Central America, the collapse of the Norse settlements in Greenland, and overpopulation and genocide in Rwanda, all examples involving the failure to sustain shared resources that contributed to trade with other groups resulting in the group's collapse when the resources were exhausted or ruined --- are relevant to us today. It is not always clear that Diamond has succeeded in meeting this challenge. In these examples, Diamond identifies several different types of failures in group decision-making. These failures are not necessarily intentional; ignorance, short-term individual self-interest, and willful indifference are more likely culprits. Groups may fail to anticipate a problem before it arrives, Diamond notes, and therefore they do not plan for the problem; when a problem does arrive, the group fails to perceive it; if the group does perceive the problem, they may even fail to try and solve it; and if the group does try to solve a problem --- either in advance of it appearing or after it appears ---- they may fail to solve the problem. There are examples of successes: the Japanese shogunate and Germans recognizing independently in the 19th century that deforestation threatened the general welfare and silviculture needed to be implemented; natural resource extraction and protection of the forest in New Guinea.
Climate change is an example of a problem that we may be failing to perceive because of "a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations." This is what Hansen et al are saying. The medieval Greenlanders had difficulty perceiving that their climate was gradually becoming colder and the Maya and Anasazi (Chaco Canyon) did not recognize their climate was becoming drier. It is referred to as "creeping normalcy." Climate change, however, is now a perceived problem and what we disagree about is the cause. A large majority of the population believe the climate is changing; they disagree on why that is the case (and in that respect a "failure to perceive" is arguably occurring). The difficulty in perceiving a cause is something that philosophers have weighed in on for centuries. (See February 27, 2011 post). Deciding on the cause is critical to deciding what to do about it. In terms of whether climate change is a problem that we fail to make good decisions about, we are staring at either the failure to even try and solve the problem or, if we do try to solve the problem, we fail in our effort. Frankly, we are at the stage where we are trying to solve the climate change problem and we are likely to fail in our effort. The lack of consensus I mentioned above has not resulted in a failure to act: individuals are doing some things to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; corporations are doing some things to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; nations are doing some things to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But this independent effort only reduces the incremental growth in carbon emissions. The solutions are not inexpensive for society; nor is all the technology probably available to address the problem. But without a coordinated effort and an appropriate set of incentives, emissions will continue to grow. Whether the current global experience with more variable climate, drought, crop failure, and habitat change causes more people to take a closer look at the science behind carbon emissions and climate change in a way that changes their understanding of the cause of climate change will be interesting. But we may be faced with inflexible "group think" that divides our society and prevents consensus on the subject from being fairly arrived at.
The public is widely divided over the veracity of Hansen's assertion that there are "gases that cause global warming" or that human activity causes global warming. While polls show that most of the public believes that global temperatures are higher now than they were in recent memory, there is no consensus over why that is the case. Hansen, and quite frankly a large number of scientists who actually study the issue, believes the cause is anthropogenic: burning fossil fuels results in increased emissions of carbon dioxide, which cannot be completely absorbed by the earth, leading to rising temperatures because the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs infrared radiation emitted when sunlight strikes the earth. While some skeptics of the claim that humans are responsible for rising temperatures are changing their minds after taking the time to actually look at the data, the lack of public consensus, even polarization, has led to a stalemate in the development of public policy and an action to address the issue. Those who deny an anthropogenic cause for rising global temperatures have successfully blocked public decision-making. It also has not helped decision-making that poor economic conditions have frozen public-decision making because of fears that short-term economic self-interests will be prejudiced and a troubled economy will be made even more troubled. Everyone, regardless of whether or not they subscribe to the anthropogenic causation view, recognizes that the cost of changing individual and collective behavior to extract and consume fewer fossil fuels, control emissions, and change economic infrastructure accordingly is extremely expensive.
Prior posts in this blog have alluded to the individual economic actor acting in his or her self-interest to maximize their individual welfare (see January 30, 2010 post ), and their behavior is typically called "rational." And it has been a central tenet of western economic philosophy that the aggregation of the self-interested decisions of these thousands and millions and billions of individual economic actors maximizes the welfare of the group, society, nation or humanity as a whole. Western philosophy has historically exalted the individual (see September 18, 2009 post), yet there is a growing body of recognition that human nature is more fundamentally social and our social philosophy needs to align itself more closely to our biological nature. (Id., see also November 9, 2010 post and July 16, 2010 post and October 13, 2010 post and January 21, 2011 post).
There is a long line of literature that refuses to the subscribe to the view that social or group welfare is maximized by the aggregate outcome of individual, self-interested decisions. Marxism is one notable philosophy that distinguished itself on that view. Marxism ultimately failed as a social philosophy because it coercively suppressed individual decision-making that could and actually would enhance group welfare. Still, it is well-documented that "rational" individual decisions can lead to undesirable outcomes for the group, society, nation, or even humanity. The tragedy of the commons is but one concept that articulates this observation. As I was beginning to write this post, the tragedy of the commons came to mind while I was watching the current Governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, introduce Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney at a political event in Norfolk, Virginia, and several times McDonnell remarked on "our god-given natural resources" as though extraction of natural resources off the coast of Virginia was a natural right that ought to be exempt from public decision-making. McDonnell may not have intended his statement in exactly that way, but the tone and political rhetoric conveyed that view. But this rhetoric is short-sighted, and frankly there are a large number of businesses today whose business models recognize it is shortsighted as well. The beverage and forest product industries are just a couple of examples. The tragedy of the commons recognizes that there are shared resources and sometimes there are multiple shared resources in the same place that compete for individual attention and individual exploitation of those shared resources can have unsustainable outcomes. The simplest example of this thesis is the pasture land exploited by a group of cattlemen or sheepherders, as shown in this video. A more complex scenario exists where we find shared resources located in the same place; for example, minerals or petroleum in the ocean or in a virgin forest stand. The challenge for public policy makers in these circumstances is not to stand on a soap box and complain about restraints on "god given" natural resources rights, but is to make good "rational" decisions that strike right balance between incentivizing (including not penalizing) individual and independent behavior and the public good.
The tragedy of the commons is a concept that underlies Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. At the core of Collapse is a series of examples that arguably represent failures of group decision-making. Diamond is focusing on ecological collapse and he identifies five factors contributing to the collapse: 1) environmental damage (pollution, deforestation), 2) climate change (drought, temperature), 3) hostile neighbors (overpopulation), (4) friendly trade partners, and (5) society's response to the problem. Diamond's challenge is to explain why his examples of societal and ecological collapse, some of which are probably obscure to most of the public --- Easter Island and its vanished forest, deforestation and overpopulation in the Pitcairn group of islands, deforestation and drought in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico that led to the disappearance of the Anasazi, the collapse of the Maya in Central America, the collapse of the Norse settlements in Greenland, and overpopulation and genocide in Rwanda, all examples involving the failure to sustain shared resources that contributed to trade with other groups resulting in the group's collapse when the resources were exhausted or ruined --- are relevant to us today. It is not always clear that Diamond has succeeded in meeting this challenge. In these examples, Diamond identifies several different types of failures in group decision-making. These failures are not necessarily intentional; ignorance, short-term individual self-interest, and willful indifference are more likely culprits. Groups may fail to anticipate a problem before it arrives, Diamond notes, and therefore they do not plan for the problem; when a problem does arrive, the group fails to perceive it; if the group does perceive the problem, they may even fail to try and solve it; and if the group does try to solve a problem --- either in advance of it appearing or after it appears ---- they may fail to solve the problem. There are examples of successes: the Japanese shogunate and Germans recognizing independently in the 19th century that deforestation threatened the general welfare and silviculture needed to be implemented; natural resource extraction and protection of the forest in New Guinea.
Climate change is an example of a problem that we may be failing to perceive because of "a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations." This is what Hansen et al are saying. The medieval Greenlanders had difficulty perceiving that their climate was gradually becoming colder and the Maya and Anasazi (Chaco Canyon) did not recognize their climate was becoming drier. It is referred to as "creeping normalcy." Climate change, however, is now a perceived problem and what we disagree about is the cause. A large majority of the population believe the climate is changing; they disagree on why that is the case (and in that respect a "failure to perceive" is arguably occurring). The difficulty in perceiving a cause is something that philosophers have weighed in on for centuries. (See February 27, 2011 post). Deciding on the cause is critical to deciding what to do about it. In terms of whether climate change is a problem that we fail to make good decisions about, we are staring at either the failure to even try and solve the problem or, if we do try to solve the problem, we fail in our effort. Frankly, we are at the stage where we are trying to solve the climate change problem and we are likely to fail in our effort. The lack of consensus I mentioned above has not resulted in a failure to act: individuals are doing some things to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; corporations are doing some things to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; nations are doing some things to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But this independent effort only reduces the incremental growth in carbon emissions. The solutions are not inexpensive for society; nor is all the technology probably available to address the problem. But without a coordinated effort and an appropriate set of incentives, emissions will continue to grow. Whether the current global experience with more variable climate, drought, crop failure, and habitat change causes more people to take a closer look at the science behind carbon emissions and climate change in a way that changes their understanding of the cause of climate change will be interesting. But we may be faced with inflexible "group think" that divides our society and prevents consensus on the subject from being fairly arrived at.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (2006)
David Nasaw's thorough biography of the life of Andrew Carnegie compels one to think about the subject of the distribution of wealth and income. Carnegie was the wealthiest person of his time: although it is fair to say that he was not a student of the subject, Carnegie certainly considered the distribution of wealth to be an important social issue of his time and he wrote about it.
Only inferentially in my discussion of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (see January 11, 2011 post) --- a fleeting reference to distributive justice --- have I broached the subject of the distribution of wealth and income in this blog. In that book, Sen did not dwell on the subject of income distribution since he was less focused on the rules that would describe a just arrangement and more focused on the process that would realize a just outcome. In contrast, Sen's sparring partner on the philosophical question of justice, John Rawls, did dwell on the subject of income distribution and developed principles of justice that tolerated income inequality as long as it maximized the welfare of the least advantaged. This is the difference principle, and it has been explained as follows:
"The difference principle requires that social institutions be arranged so that inequalities of wealth and income work to the advantage of those who will be worst off. Starting from an imagined baseline of equality, a greater total product can be generated by allowing inequalities in wages and salaries: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle requires that inequalities which increase the total product be to everyone's advantage, and specifically to the greatest advantage of those advantaged least.
"Consider four hypothetical economic structures A-D, and the lifetime-average levels of income these would produce for representative members of three different groups:
"Here the difference principle selects Economy C, because it contains the distribution where the least-advantaged group does best. Inequalities in C are to everyone's advantage relative to an equal division (Economy A), and a more equal division (Economy B). But the difference principle does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor (Economy D). The difference principle embodies equality-based reciprocity: from an egalitarian baseline it requires inequalities that are good for all, and particularly for the worst-off.
"The difference principle gives expression to the idea that natural endowments are undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because she was lucky enough to be born with gifts that are in great demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better off. In a society governed by the difference principle citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as an asset that benefits all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. “In justice as fairness,” Rawls says,“men agree to share one another's fate.”
I mention Rawls' difference principle not to endorse it, but to tee up a discussion about whether the distribution of wealth is something we have mistakenly ignored for several decades at our peril. Income inequality is but one parameter that can affect the stability of a society. As previous posts on this blog have discussed, homeostasis is a life regulating principle relating to the stability of living systems, whether the system is ecological, the biosphere, the plant or animal, or components of plants or animals (e.g. circulatory system, neurological system, digestive system). (See March 6, 2012 post and April 8, 2011 post). Living systems function within a narrow range of certain parameters. Temperature, pressure, concentrations or ratios of certain chemicals are but a few examples of the parameters. Homeostasis refers to the living system's ability to stay or return within the range of parameters that is often tied to survival, but certainly health and well-being. Homeostasis operates through what are referred to negative feedback and positive feedback loops. These are essentially a combination of sensors that determine the system is trending or operating outside the range of one or more parameters triggering responses that function to reverse or accelerate the change. There is no reason why the concept of homeostasis as applied to living systems should not be applied to social systems, which are living systems in my view. There are many who recognize income inequality as a key pararmeter in the stability of a social system, and there are those who subscribe to the view that there is a measurement (albeit no consensus on precisely what that measurement is) that reflects the degree of income inequality that is tolerable within a stable society. Rawls' difference principle is one example of how that measurement might be derived. Even if one would not select the difference principle, how large of a deviation from the difference principle should be tolerated? Is there another income group we should pay attention to?
A recent article in the National Journal about Nick Hanauer, who became incredibly wealthy as an early investor in Amazon.com, describes a not-uncommon view among the wealthy that tax policy should be designed to transfer wealth in the interest of the stability of the economic system. In recent times, we have heard similar kinds of statements from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Hanauer argues that expanding income inequality, such as that experienced in the United States in recent years, is injurious to the middle class whose role in the economy is critical to continued economic growth. A recent book by political pundt, James Carville, titled It's the Middle Class, Stupid, suggests that there is a political dimension to Hanauer's economic concerns about the middle class. President Obama's re-election rhetoric has certainly latched on to this view. If the middle class is the object of public policy's attention on the subject of income distribution --- the gruop whose welfare is to be maximized --- then Economy D in the example above, not Economy C under the Difference Principle, is selected (which, by the way, happens to maximize the welfare of the wealthiest as well).
Hanauer takes a systems approach, replete with its feedback loops to the problem, as described in the National Journal article:
"The garden is one of Hanauer’s favorite metaphors to describe a well-functioning economy. He developed it over 20 years of reading on complex systems, chaos theory, and evolutionary biology. Eventually, he says, he arrived at a place where 'you realize that the economy is characterized by the same kind of circle-of-life, natural feedback loops that characterize natural ecosystems.' The plants need the bugs need the birds need the predators. Throw off the balance, and everything wilts."
The feedback loops in a social system that "regulate" the system are communications tools active in political and and other institutional structures (e.g. religion, business, families), but ultimately political. Tax policy is one "response" that a feedback loop can trigger to make that adjustment with respect to income equality. In a system characterized by coercion, oppression, and dominance, the feedback loops may have little chance of adjusting an out-of-balance measurement of equality, unless there is a moral lever in the hands of the benevolent dictator that would make that adjustment. For example, we see Saudi leaders from time to time dispensing national/royal wealth to maintain stability. A system characterized by liberty, democracy, widespread dissemination of information, and protection of individual rights arguably enables feedback loops that, albeit imperfectly, permit adjustments in key social parameters to ensure that a certain stasis is maintained. But lately, the American political system, which is supposed to be the shining example of liberty, democracy, widespread dissemination of information, and protection of individual rights, cannot seem to engage in a civil discourse that addresses this issue. The arteries of the feedback loops are clogged with polarization. Next year, experts say, our nation will have to address tax reform, and we will have to see whether the system is capable of making balancing adjustments "to promote the general welfare" and whether the political will exists to keep its eye on that ultimate goal rather than descending into disagreements to exploit petty political opportunity and whether inequality of wealth and income, which has been widening for several decades now, will be an element of the discussion.
What does this have to do with Andrew Carnegie? Carnegie was not born into wealth, but he died the world's richest man thanks to the sale of his Carnegie Steel Company for $400 million to J.P. Morgan, who consolidated Carnegie into other steel entities to create U.S. Steel. Carnegie was a wealthy man before he disposed of his business holdings, and at a relatively early age he pledged to give away his wealth before he died. He acquired his wealth, not just because of his own skill and acumen, but because he was invited by friends who were building the nation's railroads in the 19th century to participate in their investments and he shared in the wealth they created. His wealth grew because he exploited insider knowledge, which may or may not be legal today, and was enlarged later because of activity that would certainly be deemed illegal today such as securities fraud and cartelization behavior such as price fixing and agreements with competitors to allocate markets and customers and curtail production. All of this is documented in David Nasaw's exhaustive research of Andrew Carnegie and his times. As Carnegie gradually withdrew from the day-to-day operations of his steel business, he turned more of his attention to the disposition of his wealth, establishing libraries across the United States and Europe, supporting educational institutions and teachers, as well programs to support arbitration of international disputes. Ironically, Carnegie's interest in preventing war and international disputes was not founded in some moral conviction, but because he found that political instability made it difficult to sell bonds and raise capital for some of his iron and steel bridge and other railroad related projects. Carnegie advocated that government should impose significant estate taxes on wealth to encourage the wealthy to dispose of their wealth during their lifetime. He wrote a book, The Gospel of Wealth, to spread his views. Ironically, income taxes were not part of the public policy toolkit of the time to deal with issues of equity during the late 19th century. Shortly after the ratification of the 16th amendment that exempted a federal income tax from the constitutional restrictions on direct taxes, Carnegie told President Wilson he favored a progressive income tax. "Citizens should pay taxes in proportion to their ability to do so. Millionaires have undoubted ability to pay," he wrote. Just a few years before Carnegie died in 1919, he established the Carnegie Corporation as a trust to receive and hold most of his wealth. He could not dispose of his wealth (measured in billions of dollars in today's money) fast enough, and so he parted with it before he died and it still remains a fund for its beneficiaries today. Carnegie was not the only wealthy person who dealt with his wealth in this manner: the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bessemer Trust have similar origins. Carnegie was a model a century later for today's wealthy such as Howard Hughes, Buffett and Gates. Carnegie did not have any recommendations about income or wealth inequality for public policy; he seemed to say that a person should not be restrained in how much wealth they can accumulate during their lifetime as long as they arrange to dispose of it in a manner consistent with their own view of the public good during their lifetime. Enlightened laissez-faire to say the least.
Despite a nearly unrivaled record of philanthropy during his lifetime, Carnegie's public persona was a mask. He was certainly generous, but he never apologized for his wealth, his company's profits or its conduct in generating that wealth, or his constant battle to reduce the wages of those who worked in his factories and mills. He was a devotee to the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer. He practiced self-deception and he was deceitful, as Nasaw documents. He perhaps exemplifies Robert Trivers' thesis that humans deceive themselves in order to better deceive others. (See February 4, 2012 post). Carnegie's ego was central to his deception. He craved public attention and sought the attention of the public and other world and cultural leaders, but almost always conveyed the impression that it was the public or world leaders who were seeking him out. He was one of those Scots who "invented the modern world." (See May 20, 2012 post).
Only inferentially in my discussion of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (see January 11, 2011 post) --- a fleeting reference to distributive justice --- have I broached the subject of the distribution of wealth and income in this blog. In that book, Sen did not dwell on the subject of income distribution since he was less focused on the rules that would describe a just arrangement and more focused on the process that would realize a just outcome. In contrast, Sen's sparring partner on the philosophical question of justice, John Rawls, did dwell on the subject of income distribution and developed principles of justice that tolerated income inequality as long as it maximized the welfare of the least advantaged. This is the difference principle, and it has been explained as follows:
"The difference principle requires that social institutions be arranged so that inequalities of wealth and income work to the advantage of those who will be worst off. Starting from an imagined baseline of equality, a greater total product can be generated by allowing inequalities in wages and salaries: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle requires that inequalities which increase the total product be to everyone's advantage, and specifically to the greatest advantage of those advantaged least.
"Consider four hypothetical economic structures A-D, and the lifetime-average levels of income these would produce for representative members of three different groups:
| Economy | Least-Advantaged Group | Middle Group | Most-Advantaged Group |
| A | 10,000 | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| B | 12,000 | 15,000 | 20,000 |
| C | 20,000 | 30,000 | 50,000 |
| D | 17,000 | 50,000 | 100,000 |
"Here the difference principle selects Economy C, because it contains the distribution where the least-advantaged group does best. Inequalities in C are to everyone's advantage relative to an equal division (Economy A), and a more equal division (Economy B). But the difference principle does not allow the rich to get richer at the expense of the poor (Economy D). The difference principle embodies equality-based reciprocity: from an egalitarian baseline it requires inequalities that are good for all, and particularly for the worst-off.
"The difference principle gives expression to the idea that natural endowments are undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because she was lucky enough to be born with gifts that are in great demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better off. In a society governed by the difference principle citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as an asset that benefits all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. “In justice as fairness,” Rawls says,“men agree to share one another's fate.”
I mention Rawls' difference principle not to endorse it, but to tee up a discussion about whether the distribution of wealth is something we have mistakenly ignored for several decades at our peril. Income inequality is but one parameter that can affect the stability of a society. As previous posts on this blog have discussed, homeostasis is a life regulating principle relating to the stability of living systems, whether the system is ecological, the biosphere, the plant or animal, or components of plants or animals (e.g. circulatory system, neurological system, digestive system). (See March 6, 2012 post and April 8, 2011 post). Living systems function within a narrow range of certain parameters. Temperature, pressure, concentrations or ratios of certain chemicals are but a few examples of the parameters. Homeostasis refers to the living system's ability to stay or return within the range of parameters that is often tied to survival, but certainly health and well-being. Homeostasis operates through what are referred to negative feedback and positive feedback loops. These are essentially a combination of sensors that determine the system is trending or operating outside the range of one or more parameters triggering responses that function to reverse or accelerate the change. There is no reason why the concept of homeostasis as applied to living systems should not be applied to social systems, which are living systems in my view. There are many who recognize income inequality as a key pararmeter in the stability of a social system, and there are those who subscribe to the view that there is a measurement (albeit no consensus on precisely what that measurement is) that reflects the degree of income inequality that is tolerable within a stable society. Rawls' difference principle is one example of how that measurement might be derived. Even if one would not select the difference principle, how large of a deviation from the difference principle should be tolerated? Is there another income group we should pay attention to?
A recent article in the National Journal about Nick Hanauer, who became incredibly wealthy as an early investor in Amazon.com, describes a not-uncommon view among the wealthy that tax policy should be designed to transfer wealth in the interest of the stability of the economic system. In recent times, we have heard similar kinds of statements from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Hanauer argues that expanding income inequality, such as that experienced in the United States in recent years, is injurious to the middle class whose role in the economy is critical to continued economic growth. A recent book by political pundt, James Carville, titled It's the Middle Class, Stupid, suggests that there is a political dimension to Hanauer's economic concerns about the middle class. President Obama's re-election rhetoric has certainly latched on to this view. If the middle class is the object of public policy's attention on the subject of income distribution --- the gruop whose welfare is to be maximized --- then Economy D in the example above, not Economy C under the Difference Principle, is selected (which, by the way, happens to maximize the welfare of the wealthiest as well).
Hanauer takes a systems approach, replete with its feedback loops to the problem, as described in the National Journal article:
"The garden is one of Hanauer’s favorite metaphors to describe a well-functioning economy. He developed it over 20 years of reading on complex systems, chaos theory, and evolutionary biology. Eventually, he says, he arrived at a place where 'you realize that the economy is characterized by the same kind of circle-of-life, natural feedback loops that characterize natural ecosystems.' The plants need the bugs need the birds need the predators. Throw off the balance, and everything wilts."
The feedback loops in a social system that "regulate" the system are communications tools active in political and and other institutional structures (e.g. religion, business, families), but ultimately political. Tax policy is one "response" that a feedback loop can trigger to make that adjustment with respect to income equality. In a system characterized by coercion, oppression, and dominance, the feedback loops may have little chance of adjusting an out-of-balance measurement of equality, unless there is a moral lever in the hands of the benevolent dictator that would make that adjustment. For example, we see Saudi leaders from time to time dispensing national/royal wealth to maintain stability. A system characterized by liberty, democracy, widespread dissemination of information, and protection of individual rights arguably enables feedback loops that, albeit imperfectly, permit adjustments in key social parameters to ensure that a certain stasis is maintained. But lately, the American political system, which is supposed to be the shining example of liberty, democracy, widespread dissemination of information, and protection of individual rights, cannot seem to engage in a civil discourse that addresses this issue. The arteries of the feedback loops are clogged with polarization. Next year, experts say, our nation will have to address tax reform, and we will have to see whether the system is capable of making balancing adjustments "to promote the general welfare" and whether the political will exists to keep its eye on that ultimate goal rather than descending into disagreements to exploit petty political opportunity and whether inequality of wealth and income, which has been widening for several decades now, will be an element of the discussion.
What does this have to do with Andrew Carnegie? Carnegie was not born into wealth, but he died the world's richest man thanks to the sale of his Carnegie Steel Company for $400 million to J.P. Morgan, who consolidated Carnegie into other steel entities to create U.S. Steel. Carnegie was a wealthy man before he disposed of his business holdings, and at a relatively early age he pledged to give away his wealth before he died. He acquired his wealth, not just because of his own skill and acumen, but because he was invited by friends who were building the nation's railroads in the 19th century to participate in their investments and he shared in the wealth they created. His wealth grew because he exploited insider knowledge, which may or may not be legal today, and was enlarged later because of activity that would certainly be deemed illegal today such as securities fraud and cartelization behavior such as price fixing and agreements with competitors to allocate markets and customers and curtail production. All of this is documented in David Nasaw's exhaustive research of Andrew Carnegie and his times. As Carnegie gradually withdrew from the day-to-day operations of his steel business, he turned more of his attention to the disposition of his wealth, establishing libraries across the United States and Europe, supporting educational institutions and teachers, as well programs to support arbitration of international disputes. Ironically, Carnegie's interest in preventing war and international disputes was not founded in some moral conviction, but because he found that political instability made it difficult to sell bonds and raise capital for some of his iron and steel bridge and other railroad related projects. Carnegie advocated that government should impose significant estate taxes on wealth to encourage the wealthy to dispose of their wealth during their lifetime. He wrote a book, The Gospel of Wealth, to spread his views. Ironically, income taxes were not part of the public policy toolkit of the time to deal with issues of equity during the late 19th century. Shortly after the ratification of the 16th amendment that exempted a federal income tax from the constitutional restrictions on direct taxes, Carnegie told President Wilson he favored a progressive income tax. "Citizens should pay taxes in proportion to their ability to do so. Millionaires have undoubted ability to pay," he wrote. Just a few years before Carnegie died in 1919, he established the Carnegie Corporation as a trust to receive and hold most of his wealth. He could not dispose of his wealth (measured in billions of dollars in today's money) fast enough, and so he parted with it before he died and it still remains a fund for its beneficiaries today. Carnegie was not the only wealthy person who dealt with his wealth in this manner: the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bessemer Trust have similar origins. Carnegie was a model a century later for today's wealthy such as Howard Hughes, Buffett and Gates. Carnegie did not have any recommendations about income or wealth inequality for public policy; he seemed to say that a person should not be restrained in how much wealth they can accumulate during their lifetime as long as they arrange to dispose of it in a manner consistent with their own view of the public good during their lifetime. Enlightened laissez-faire to say the least.
Despite a nearly unrivaled record of philanthropy during his lifetime, Carnegie's public persona was a mask. He was certainly generous, but he never apologized for his wealth, his company's profits or its conduct in generating that wealth, or his constant battle to reduce the wages of those who worked in his factories and mills. He was a devotee to the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer. He practiced self-deception and he was deceitful, as Nasaw documents. He perhaps exemplifies Robert Trivers' thesis that humans deceive themselves in order to better deceive others. (See February 4, 2012 post). Carnegie's ego was central to his deception. He craved public attention and sought the attention of the public and other world and cultural leaders, but almost always conveyed the impression that it was the public or world leaders who were seeking him out. He was one of those Scots who "invented the modern world." (See May 20, 2012 post).
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels (2008)
At the dawn of the American republic, the new nation was in a precarious financial condition. The nation was indebted to France for financing the rebellious colonies during the revolutionary war, and the States were indebted to the soldiers of the continental army for war pay they never received. What's the solution to reducing the national debt? Why taxes, of course: in this case, sin taxes on the production of whiskey that agitated a minority living in the woods of western Pennsylvania, which prompted the President of the United States, George Washington, to get on his horse as commander and chief, head west toward Pittsburgh and suppress the agitators. And simultaneously, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed the creation of the Bank of the United States, partly owned by the United States, but further capitalized by private investment through the issuance of stock.
If you believe that 21st century American politics and finance are riddled with corruption now, if you believe that taxes are not the price we pay for civilization, than not much has changed in 220 years or so since the era described in David Liss' work of historical fiction, The Whiskey Rebels. While the Whiskey Rebellion sets the stage for Liss' storyline, this novel is thematically a continuation of Liss' interest in insider trading and market manipulation covered in the early London stock exchanges in The Paper Conspiracy. (See November 16, 2011 post). As in The Paper Conspiracy, many of the protagonists are real, historical figures, and the story is at its core true. The key difference between the stock exchanges of early 18th century London and late 18th century Philadelphia and New York is that stocks are traded in coffee houses in London and taverns in New York and Philadelphia. William Duer, a financial speculator, who caused the nation's first financial panic by trying to manipulate the market for government securities and bank stocks is a prominent figure here. Alexander Hamilton, masterfully covered in Ron Chernow's recent biography, is more of a mystery in this story.
The Whiskey Rebels is a good read, but the interview with David Liss in the back of the paperback version of this novel is most interesting. "What I think about the function of this historical novel," Liss says, "I tend to think about what it can do that history cannot. I think if you want simply to learn about the root causes of the Whiskey Rebellion or the Panic of 1792, there are numerous excellent works that you can reference that can provide all the important information you need. On the other hand, fiction can attempt to recreate the human experience of these events, the emotion context and specific subjectivity of living through such pivotal moments. It is all guesswork, of course. We can never really know how people in the past experienced their lives, but it is great fun, and interesting to try." This statement speaks volumes about how the Bible was written. (See May 22, 2011 post).
If you believe that 21st century American politics and finance are riddled with corruption now, if you believe that taxes are not the price we pay for civilization, than not much has changed in 220 years or so since the era described in David Liss' work of historical fiction, The Whiskey Rebels. While the Whiskey Rebellion sets the stage for Liss' storyline, this novel is thematically a continuation of Liss' interest in insider trading and market manipulation covered in the early London stock exchanges in The Paper Conspiracy. (See November 16, 2011 post). As in The Paper Conspiracy, many of the protagonists are real, historical figures, and the story is at its core true. The key difference between the stock exchanges of early 18th century London and late 18th century Philadelphia and New York is that stocks are traded in coffee houses in London and taverns in New York and Philadelphia. William Duer, a financial speculator, who caused the nation's first financial panic by trying to manipulate the market for government securities and bank stocks is a prominent figure here. Alexander Hamilton, masterfully covered in Ron Chernow's recent biography, is more of a mystery in this story.
The Whiskey Rebels is a good read, but the interview with David Liss in the back of the paperback version of this novel is most interesting. "What I think about the function of this historical novel," Liss says, "I tend to think about what it can do that history cannot. I think if you want simply to learn about the root causes of the Whiskey Rebellion or the Panic of 1792, there are numerous excellent works that you can reference that can provide all the important information you need. On the other hand, fiction can attempt to recreate the human experience of these events, the emotion context and specific subjectivity of living through such pivotal moments. It is all guesswork, of course. We can never really know how people in the past experienced their lives, but it is great fun, and interesting to try." This statement speaks volumes about how the Bible was written. (See May 22, 2011 post).
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Arthur Herman, How The Scots Invented the Modern World (2001)
Migration, when one first contemplates the subject, brings to mind human migration: out-of-Africa, across the Arctic land bridge, the Silk Road, across oceans in boats, and perhaps some day to other planetary objects. Reverting, however, to a theme that begins with the opening post in this blog, migration refers, at its most fundamental level, to the migration of information: the migration of genetic information via biological mechanisms, such as sexual intercourse, and molecular mechanisms such transcription; the migration of culture and ideas and language through the movement of peoples; and to a lesser, but nevertheless equally significant extent, through the movement of other species and even atomic particles. (See August 15, 2011 post).
Arthur Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, How The Scots Invented the Modern World, is a book about the migration of people, culture, and ideas. Herman's story begins in 1696, more than two decades after the death of Baruch Spinoza (see March 20, 2012 and March 12, 2012 post) in The Hague, when a 19-year old Scottish theology student, Thomas Aikenhead, utters to some friends, while walking outside on a cold August evening in Edinburgh, "I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell to warm myself there." The remark may have been intended as a joke, and his friends may have laughed, but it was repeated to local church authorities who did not find the remark to be humorous. Others came forward and reported that young Aikenhead had told others that the Bible was not the literal word of god, but the invention of the prophet Ezra. Aikenhead purportedly claimed that Jesus performed no miracles, and that reports of miracles were "cheap magic tricks." Aikenhead reportedly said that the purported resurrection of Jesus was a myth, and that Moses had been a better magician and politician than Jesus. Genesis was a myth as well. He claimed that god, nature, and the world were one, and that had been the case for eternity. Aikenhead must have heard about or read Spinoza. These are Spinoza's ideas. The migration of Spinozism across the North Sea is not a subject that Herman addresses in this book, but it is a subject that is central to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, which covers the continental migration of Spinozism during the late 17th and 18th centuries. The outcome was different, perhaps reflecting differences between Dutch tolerance and Scottish intolerance. Spinoza was excommunicated by his community; Aikenhead was condemned to death.
By the end of Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is Scotland's culture of tolerance that has infected other parts of the globe, setting off liberation movements. Indeed, only fifty years later David Hume expresses many of the same thoughts (see May 24, 2010 post), and he lives to a ripe old age. The seeds of Scottish tolerance, Herman writes, were planted a full century before the death of Thomas Aikenhead and a century in advance of John Locke, when George Buchanan, a Scotsman and tutor to the boy who became James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots, wrote the The Art and Science of Government Among the Scots. All political authority, Buchanan said, ultimately belonged to the people, who "have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish." James VI (he who was later James I of England for whom the King James Bible is dedicated) obviously disagreed and ignored his tutor. But the Kirk --- the Church of Scotland --- did not disagree and the popular election of church elders and ministers was institutionalized in Scotland.
Just a few decades after the execution of Thomas Aikenhead, the Scottish assault on some of the basic tenets of Christianity resumed. Deism was flowering in England at this time. Scotland's Francis Hutcheson was not only casting doubt on the trinity and the status of Jesus as the "son of god," but he also asserted that belief in Jesus was not necessary for salvation. Hutcheson advocated "natural religion." Man carries within him the spark of divine reason. Man enjoyed natural rights in life and property. Obedience to law was not established by submission to divine or kingly authority, but through common consent, including moral law. Moral reasoning is a natural human faculty: man carried with him the means to learn to be helpful to others, and in helping others, man finds pleasure. Happiness --- the pursuit of happiness --- is found in making others happy. Hutcheson's views were not entirely original, as the seeds had been planted by his teachers including John Simson at the University of Glasgow and Gershom Carmichael. He was also influenced by the Earl of Shaftesbury. It is Hutcheson who in 1729 refers to "unalienable rights" in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. An unalienable right is our sense of private of judgement: our right to think our own minds. An unalienable right "acts as an essential limitation on all governments," Hutcheson avers. We begin to see here the beginnings of ideas that would migrate to the North American continent and prove influential in inspiring a new form of government based on liberty the consent of the governed.
Harry Homes, a Scottish lawyer, later known as Lord Kames, advanced a view of the history of man in four stages: the hunter/fisherman stage; the pastoral/nomadic stage where men sought cooperation from other men, but without the need for a government except at the family level; the agrarian stage where cooperation was combined with a need for sanctions and the beginnings of a state; and the commercial stage, which featured greater networks of social and economic cooperation of increasing complexity, including contractual cooperation that required a means for enforcement, including new laws and agencies of the state. This was the Scottish Historical School, which recognized the commercial stage as that beneficial confluence and linkage of industry, knowledge and humanity that made men free. Kames felt that the most important human instinct is the sense of property and desire to own things, which is tied to our sense of self. Property therefore became linked with self-worth. Kames' student, David Hume, advanced the idea that the role of government was to check other people's avidity for our own personal property: to protect the property rights of individuals. Again, we see in this emphasis on individual property rights the beginning of ideas that would migrate to North America and become foundations of a new republican democracy.
The migration of Scottish people to North America was quite substantial. Two hundred thousand Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland with their own brand of Scottish Calvinism migrated broadly to the American colonies and particularly across the southern colonies; Highlanders migrated to Canada and the American colonies. They all brought with them their sense of independence and industry as well their cultural institutions that embraced self-governance.
Herman cites the influence of Benjamin Rush, an Englishman with a Scottish education, and Scotsman John Witherspoon, as influential in helping to establish the values of the Scottish Enlightenment as part of the new American democracy. Witherspoon became the President of Princeton University, who promoted a spirit of freedom of inquiry within the college. He was later a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. James Madison, a future President of the United States and one author of the American Constitution, was a student at Princeton at the time of Witherspoon's leadership. Herman writes that Madison found himself drawn to another Scotsman, David Hume, an intellectual nemesis of Witherspoon because of Hume's views on "natural religion," which were antithetical to Witherspoon's Evangelical Christianity. In a little-known essay penned by Hume entitled "The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," Herman says, Madison found his view that an extended republic might be most stable form of government of all. "Although the people as a body are unfit for government," Hume wrote, "yet when dispersed in small bodies [such as individual states] they are more susceptible both to reason and order; the force of popular currents and ties is, in great measure, broken." In Hume's view, Herman says, the elite coordinate the movement of the various parts of the whole, rather than plotting its overthrow, and the parts "are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest." From this perspective evolved Madison's view of co-equal branches of government and and a government that pits smaller state interests against one another that results in either gridlock or compromise. And within a polity that features gridlock or compromise, liberty is guaranteed.
Herman tells a good story, and if one has not fully appreciated the role of the Scottish people and persons of Scottish heritage in the spread of liberal ideas and the advancement of science and technology across the globe in the 18th and 19th century, they will now. The more interesting phenomenon in my view is the broad concept of migration I outlined at the beginning of this post. This story is just one example of migration. And it is myopic to think of migration in terms of this one example. A broader, comparative approach would compare the migration of peoples, ideas, and cultures from other parts of the globe at the same time: from Africa, from England, from the European continent and to understand how they collectively influenced North America; of Jews, of evangelical Christians, of deists, of Catholics, and even those whose persuasion some called atheism and others called "natural religion;" of those with property and those without property; of those who were indentured and those who came to govern. One could walk away from Herman's story with the view that the Scots "invented" America, and we know that was not the case. But they surely made a substantial contribution.
Arthur Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, How The Scots Invented the Modern World, is a book about the migration of people, culture, and ideas. Herman's story begins in 1696, more than two decades after the death of Baruch Spinoza (see March 20, 2012 and March 12, 2012 post) in The Hague, when a 19-year old Scottish theology student, Thomas Aikenhead, utters to some friends, while walking outside on a cold August evening in Edinburgh, "I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell to warm myself there." The remark may have been intended as a joke, and his friends may have laughed, but it was repeated to local church authorities who did not find the remark to be humorous. Others came forward and reported that young Aikenhead had told others that the Bible was not the literal word of god, but the invention of the prophet Ezra. Aikenhead purportedly claimed that Jesus performed no miracles, and that reports of miracles were "cheap magic tricks." Aikenhead reportedly said that the purported resurrection of Jesus was a myth, and that Moses had been a better magician and politician than Jesus. Genesis was a myth as well. He claimed that god, nature, and the world were one, and that had been the case for eternity. Aikenhead must have heard about or read Spinoza. These are Spinoza's ideas. The migration of Spinozism across the North Sea is not a subject that Herman addresses in this book, but it is a subject that is central to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, which covers the continental migration of Spinozism during the late 17th and 18th centuries. The outcome was different, perhaps reflecting differences between Dutch tolerance and Scottish intolerance. Spinoza was excommunicated by his community; Aikenhead was condemned to death.
By the end of Herman's history of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is Scotland's culture of tolerance that has infected other parts of the globe, setting off liberation movements. Indeed, only fifty years later David Hume expresses many of the same thoughts (see May 24, 2010 post), and he lives to a ripe old age. The seeds of Scottish tolerance, Herman writes, were planted a full century before the death of Thomas Aikenhead and a century in advance of John Locke, when George Buchanan, a Scotsman and tutor to the boy who became James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots, wrote the The Art and Science of Government Among the Scots. All political authority, Buchanan said, ultimately belonged to the people, who "have the right to confer the royal authority upon whomever they wish." James VI (he who was later James I of England for whom the King James Bible is dedicated) obviously disagreed and ignored his tutor. But the Kirk --- the Church of Scotland --- did not disagree and the popular election of church elders and ministers was institutionalized in Scotland.
Just a few decades after the execution of Thomas Aikenhead, the Scottish assault on some of the basic tenets of Christianity resumed. Deism was flowering in England at this time. Scotland's Francis Hutcheson was not only casting doubt on the trinity and the status of Jesus as the "son of god," but he also asserted that belief in Jesus was not necessary for salvation. Hutcheson advocated "natural religion." Man carries within him the spark of divine reason. Man enjoyed natural rights in life and property. Obedience to law was not established by submission to divine or kingly authority, but through common consent, including moral law. Moral reasoning is a natural human faculty: man carried with him the means to learn to be helpful to others, and in helping others, man finds pleasure. Happiness --- the pursuit of happiness --- is found in making others happy. Hutcheson's views were not entirely original, as the seeds had been planted by his teachers including John Simson at the University of Glasgow and Gershom Carmichael. He was also influenced by the Earl of Shaftesbury. It is Hutcheson who in 1729 refers to "unalienable rights" in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. An unalienable right is our sense of private of judgement: our right to think our own minds. An unalienable right "acts as an essential limitation on all governments," Hutcheson avers. We begin to see here the beginnings of ideas that would migrate to the North American continent and prove influential in inspiring a new form of government based on liberty the consent of the governed.
Harry Homes, a Scottish lawyer, later known as Lord Kames, advanced a view of the history of man in four stages: the hunter/fisherman stage; the pastoral/nomadic stage where men sought cooperation from other men, but without the need for a government except at the family level; the agrarian stage where cooperation was combined with a need for sanctions and the beginnings of a state; and the commercial stage, which featured greater networks of social and economic cooperation of increasing complexity, including contractual cooperation that required a means for enforcement, including new laws and agencies of the state. This was the Scottish Historical School, which recognized the commercial stage as that beneficial confluence and linkage of industry, knowledge and humanity that made men free. Kames felt that the most important human instinct is the sense of property and desire to own things, which is tied to our sense of self. Property therefore became linked with self-worth. Kames' student, David Hume, advanced the idea that the role of government was to check other people's avidity for our own personal property: to protect the property rights of individuals. Again, we see in this emphasis on individual property rights the beginning of ideas that would migrate to North America and become foundations of a new republican democracy.
The migration of Scottish people to North America was quite substantial. Two hundred thousand Ulster Scots from Northern Ireland with their own brand of Scottish Calvinism migrated broadly to the American colonies and particularly across the southern colonies; Highlanders migrated to Canada and the American colonies. They all brought with them their sense of independence and industry as well their cultural institutions that embraced self-governance.
Herman cites the influence of Benjamin Rush, an Englishman with a Scottish education, and Scotsman John Witherspoon, as influential in helping to establish the values of the Scottish Enlightenment as part of the new American democracy. Witherspoon became the President of Princeton University, who promoted a spirit of freedom of inquiry within the college. He was later a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. James Madison, a future President of the United States and one author of the American Constitution, was a student at Princeton at the time of Witherspoon's leadership. Herman writes that Madison found himself drawn to another Scotsman, David Hume, an intellectual nemesis of Witherspoon because of Hume's views on "natural religion," which were antithetical to Witherspoon's Evangelical Christianity. In a little-known essay penned by Hume entitled "The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," Herman says, Madison found his view that an extended republic might be most stable form of government of all. "Although the people as a body are unfit for government," Hume wrote, "yet when dispersed in small bodies [such as individual states] they are more susceptible both to reason and order; the force of popular currents and ties is, in great measure, broken." In Hume's view, Herman says, the elite coordinate the movement of the various parts of the whole, rather than plotting its overthrow, and the parts "are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest." From this perspective evolved Madison's view of co-equal branches of government and and a government that pits smaller state interests against one another that results in either gridlock or compromise. And within a polity that features gridlock or compromise, liberty is guaranteed.
Herman tells a good story, and if one has not fully appreciated the role of the Scottish people and persons of Scottish heritage in the spread of liberal ideas and the advancement of science and technology across the globe in the 18th and 19th century, they will now. The more interesting phenomenon in my view is the broad concept of migration I outlined at the beginning of this post. This story is just one example of migration. And it is myopic to think of migration in terms of this one example. A broader, comparative approach would compare the migration of peoples, ideas, and cultures from other parts of the globe at the same time: from Africa, from England, from the European continent and to understand how they collectively influenced North America; of Jews, of evangelical Christians, of deists, of Catholics, and even those whose persuasion some called atheism and others called "natural religion;" of those with property and those without property; of those who were indentured and those who came to govern. One could walk away from Herman's story with the view that the Scots "invented" America, and we know that was not the case. But they surely made a substantial contribution.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem (2012)
The Finkler Question explored the subject of cultural and individual identity, and in a previous post about that book I explored the history of how the 18th century's "Jewish question" evolved to become the 19th and 20th century's "Jewish problem," a problem, which for minds tainted with hate, sought a "solution." (See December 2, 2011 post). In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom cleverly reweaves each of these themes in a work of historical fiction, that pits the mind of Enlightenment philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who reasoned his way out of his cultural identity, abandoning all cultural identity in favor of substance monism, against the troubled mind of one of Nazidom's principal racial propagandists, Alfred Rosenberg, for whom cultural identity was nearly everything and his personal identity was in constant crisis and ultimately sublimated to the personal identity of Adolf Hitler.
Yalom suggests that Spinoza may have had his own personal identity crisis. In the Portugese community he is Bento Spinoza; his Hebrew name is Baruch Spinoza; and following his excommunication, he latinized his name (meaning blessed) to Benedict Spinoza. There is a parallel with another identity transformation here: Yeshua (Joshua in English) of Nazareth who was latinized a few hundred years later "Jesus." The difference is that Spinoza made himself out of something he was not; in the case of Yeshua, others made him into something he was not.
Spinoza came to know himself as part of a larger system that transcended cultural identity. Rosenberg, on the other hand, never did come to know himself except as anything but his cultural identity.
The Spinoza "problem" is an interesting twist on Nazidom's "jewish problem." Spinoza presented a challenge for the "jewish problem." How could a jew not be a jew? How could a jew be viewed as a philosophical pillar by the pillars of German philosophy such as Goethe? In the rush to assemble a master race, was there room for exceptions? The "problem" was explored in the posting on The Finkler Question (see December 2, 2011 post). For the Nazis, race was a matter of "blood" (consanguinity) --- once a Jew, always a Jew; as I explained in previous post, group acceptance (or rejection) and group identity for Jews has more to do with a set of shared values rather than blood, although "blood" is not entirely removed from Jewish identity (there is a reason why the Book of Genesis traces generations of ancestors). In the end, according to this fictional narrative, Rosenberg finds no room for Spinoza in Nazidom's master race.
Much is made in this work of fiction of Spinoza's solitary life. Toward the end of the novel, the fictional character, Franco, asks Spinoza: "But, Bento, explain to me: how can you, how do you, live in such solitude? You are not by nature a cold, distant person. I'm certain of that because, whenever we are together, I feel such a strong connection --- on your part as well as mine. I know there is a love between us." Spinoza later responds, "But I don't envision man as a creature of solitude. It's just that I have a different perspective on the idea of connection. I seek the joyous experience that issues not so much from connection as from the loss of separateness." Two comments on this exchange. As Matthew Stewart describes Spinoza in The Courtier and the Heretic, Spinoza was far more connected than Yalom makes him out to be. Spinoza communicated with the European intellectual community both within Holland and beyond the Dutch borders Yes, he had forsaken a family life; yes, he was separated and isolated from his Jewish and Portuguese community; but he was not separated and isolated from the intellectual community. He traveled to some extent, and he had friends. Yalom almost makes Spinoza out to be a hermit, which he was not. He left a valuable body of correspondence behind. Secondly, Spinoza's fictional response to Franco in this novel is fair: "I seek a joyous experience that issues . . . from the loss of separateness." This is Spinozism, if you want to put a label on it. Like the biological history of DNA and genetic material from its earliest origins to wherever we find it as part of living organisms today, everything across time is made of the same substance; modes of substance are not separate from other modes. Yes, we can find different attributes with different modes of this substance. But everything is part of the same substance and when we consider all substance, we can call it god, says Spinoza. Rosenberg, blinded by hate, could never envision a loss of separateness. But hate is not the only thing that causes us to fail to experience a loss of separateness. The tug of the community, the family, the group, and the nation does much the same. Spinoza was a unique individual. I say that not only because he was at peace with himself in a system he called god, but because excommunication from one's community can engender ill-feelings toward others and Spinoza overcame all that through a greater knowledge than most individuals ever care to pursue.
Yalom suggests that Spinoza may have had his own personal identity crisis. In the Portugese community he is Bento Spinoza; his Hebrew name is Baruch Spinoza; and following his excommunication, he latinized his name (meaning blessed) to Benedict Spinoza. There is a parallel with another identity transformation here: Yeshua (Joshua in English) of Nazareth who was latinized a few hundred years later "Jesus." The difference is that Spinoza made himself out of something he was not; in the case of Yeshua, others made him into something he was not.
Spinoza came to know himself as part of a larger system that transcended cultural identity. Rosenberg, on the other hand, never did come to know himself except as anything but his cultural identity.
The Spinoza "problem" is an interesting twist on Nazidom's "jewish problem." Spinoza presented a challenge for the "jewish problem." How could a jew not be a jew? How could a jew be viewed as a philosophical pillar by the pillars of German philosophy such as Goethe? In the rush to assemble a master race, was there room for exceptions? The "problem" was explored in the posting on The Finkler Question (see December 2, 2011 post). For the Nazis, race was a matter of "blood" (consanguinity) --- once a Jew, always a Jew; as I explained in previous post, group acceptance (or rejection) and group identity for Jews has more to do with a set of shared values rather than blood, although "blood" is not entirely removed from Jewish identity (there is a reason why the Book of Genesis traces generations of ancestors). In the end, according to this fictional narrative, Rosenberg finds no room for Spinoza in Nazidom's master race.
Much is made in this work of fiction of Spinoza's solitary life. Toward the end of the novel, the fictional character, Franco, asks Spinoza: "But, Bento, explain to me: how can you, how do you, live in such solitude? You are not by nature a cold, distant person. I'm certain of that because, whenever we are together, I feel such a strong connection --- on your part as well as mine. I know there is a love between us." Spinoza later responds, "But I don't envision man as a creature of solitude. It's just that I have a different perspective on the idea of connection. I seek the joyous experience that issues not so much from connection as from the loss of separateness." Two comments on this exchange. As Matthew Stewart describes Spinoza in The Courtier and the Heretic, Spinoza was far more connected than Yalom makes him out to be. Spinoza communicated with the European intellectual community both within Holland and beyond the Dutch borders Yes, he had forsaken a family life; yes, he was separated and isolated from his Jewish and Portuguese community; but he was not separated and isolated from the intellectual community. He traveled to some extent, and he had friends. Yalom almost makes Spinoza out to be a hermit, which he was not. He left a valuable body of correspondence behind. Secondly, Spinoza's fictional response to Franco in this novel is fair: "I seek a joyous experience that issues . . . from the loss of separateness." This is Spinozism, if you want to put a label on it. Like the biological history of DNA and genetic material from its earliest origins to wherever we find it as part of living organisms today, everything across time is made of the same substance; modes of substance are not separate from other modes. Yes, we can find different attributes with different modes of this substance. But everything is part of the same substance and when we consider all substance, we can call it god, says Spinoza. Rosenberg, blinded by hate, could never envision a loss of separateness. But hate is not the only thing that causes us to fail to experience a loss of separateness. The tug of the community, the family, the group, and the nation does much the same. Spinoza was a unique individual. I say that not only because he was at peace with himself in a system he called god, but because excommunication from one's community can engender ill-feelings toward others and Spinoza overcame all that through a greater knowledge than most individuals ever care to pursue.
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