Meeting Judith Butler halfway: Science, Darwin, and adaptation to postmodernism

Bonobos grooming each other

[Note: We are publishing this piece as part of our commitment to encourage an atmosphere of debate among Marxists over contentious issues of contemporary philosophy and science. A rejoinder from Steiner will follow shortly.]

 

Daniel Lazare

 

Alex Steiner has responded to my Feb. 2 article about trans ideology (“Materialism and gender theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck”) with a broadside of his own charging me with a wide range of intellectual and theoretical offenses.  Interestingly enough, none of the alleged transgressions has to do with the article’s discussion of the trans movement itself even though most people would assume that would be the most controversial aspect.  On that score, Steiner is actually quite complimentary.  My article, he says: 

...neatly exposes the largely fictitious narrative about the beneficial effects of transgender surgery, particularly when it involves adolescents who have not matured sufficiently to make an informed decision about a matter that will affect them for the remainder of their life.  Lazare does a nice job in exposing the lies and banalities of the proponents of these dangerous medical practices and the mostly leftwing theorists who provide them with the theoretical justification for their work.    Lazare also demonstrates how the irrationality behind much of “woke” ideology feeds into atavistic fears that are exploited by the right.   Much of what can be called the Marxist left has prostrated themselves before the petty bourgeois radicals pushing “gender identity” politics. 

On the same day the article appeared, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons announced that it would become the first major US medical association to oppose gender surgery for adolescents, in itself powerful evidence that the article was correct in arguing that the current approach to “gender-affirmative” treatment is fundamentally unscientific.  Considering that NO Marxist outlets have had the courage or insight to take a clear stand on this issue, Permanent Revolution is to be congratulated for hosting the first Marxist polemic against a medical scandal that has been going on for years. 

But that is not the subject of Steiner’s ire.  What is, rather, is a host of related issues having to do with biology, sexuality, and evolutionary theory.  Among other things, his rejoinder (“Marxism, psychoanalysis, and human sexuality”) accuses me of neglecting Freud, “the godfather of all gender theory”; misconstruing the ideas of gender theorist Judith Butler; over-reliance on the flawed work of gender critic Kathleen Stock, and failing to understand the uniqueness of human sexuality because I allegedly insist on seeing it “through the prism of a general concept of sexuality appropriate to other animal species which is rooted in the innate drive to reproduce and little else.” 

Needless to say, it’s all wildly askew.  Although Steiner’s complaints are diverse, there is a common thread throughout: hostility to science, Darwin, and the historical-materialist analysis that is at the core of Marxist methodology.  Given Steiner’s confusion on this topic, he is unable to see that postmodernists like Butler suffer from a similar blind spot. As a result, he lets them off with a slap on the wrist at most while saddling historical materialists with “the sin of reductionism” because they insist that the bio-evolutionary nature of gender and sexuality must not be overlooked. 

Steiner shows his poor grasp of science when he sides with Butler on the question of “vitalistic” biology.  This is important because Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble, the 1990 book that all but single-handedly launched the gender movement, is that biology is just as much a myth as any other theory about the human body and that true freedom lies in casting it off.  My Feb. 2 article quoted Gender Trouble as saying: 

Any theory of the culturally constructed body ...  ought to question “the body” as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse.   There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century, understand “the body” as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine.[1] 

Hence my conclusion that, according to Butler’s upside-down logic, “[m]odern biology is as much a social construct as medieval theology.”  To which Steiner replies: not so fast!  The reason is that the term “vitalistic biologies” refers not to 19^th-century biology in general, but to “an outdated school of biology – some would even call it a pseudo-science” – and that Butler “is not referencing ‘modern biology’ at all.”  As a result, “her critique of both the mechanical materialist concept of a biological organism and the vitalist concept is essentially correct,” while my own interpretation is the one that’s flawed.  

This is off-base for reasons having to do with historical context.  Vitalism may seem like a pseudo-science in hindsight, but at the time it was anything but.  Where Descartes dismissed living creatures as nothing more than mechanical devices, no different than a clock or pulley, the 18^th-century French vitalist Xavier Bichat intensively studied living tissue in an effort to determine what made it distinct.  The pioneering organic chemist Justus von Liebig studied animal and plant metabolism for the same reason, i.e. to see how it differed from ordinary combustion.  “There is nothing to prevent us from considering the vital force as a peculiar property,” Liebig wrote in 1842, “which is possessed by certain material bodies, and becomes sensible when their elementary particles are combined in a certain arrangement or form.”[2] 

Another vitalist was Louis Pasteur.[3]  He was eager to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation, which is to say life emerging out of non-life, because he was convinced that, due to some ineluctable quality, living creatures could only arise out of other living creatures.  This led to his famous fermentation experiments in which, beginning in 1854, he showed that the process could not take place when the substance was isolated from foreign biological contaminants.  Fermentation, according to Pasteur, was thus a “vital process” that was fundamentally different from ordinary chemistry.  We now know that Pasteur was wrong and that spontaneous generation must have occurred in some primordial era when life first arose.  But that’s because Darwin, whose Origin of the Species came out five years after Pasteur began his fermentation studies, has provided us with an understanding of biological history that didn’t previously exist. 

But if vitalism is a pseudo-science, as Steiner suggests, what does that make Pasteur – a quack? 

Steiner’s defense of Butler is wrong on two counts.  First, he fails to see that Butler is so dismissive of science and therefore so ignorant of what it means that she has little idea of what biology even is, “vitalistic” or otherwise.  She is intellectually unequipped to make the distinction that Steiner ascribes to her.  Second, he doesn’t realize that even though vitalism turned out to be incorrect in certain respects, it still constituted an important advance.  After all, Copernicus also turned out to be incorrect in certain regards.  (He thought that planetary orbits were circular whereas Kepler would later show that they were elliptical.)  But that doesn’t make heliocentrism anything less than a revolutionary advance over earlier forms of cosmology in which the Earth was seen as at the center of the universe. 

Steiner’s anti-scientific attitudes are even more obvious in his discussion of “shoe fetishism” and other forms of human non-procreative sexual behavior: 

[T]he panoply of human sexuality is full of examples similar to a shoe fetish in being at several removes from any connection to biological reproduction.  A glaringly obvious example is homosexuality, another would be sadomasochism.  I have no doubt that some of today’s more “creative” sociobiologists – now calling themselves “evolutionary psychologists,” would nevertheless come up with remarkable “just so” stories to explain this conundrum. 

The argument here is three-fold: that my article fails to understand the uniquely non-procreative nature of human sexuality and consequently suffers from the aforementioned “sin of reductionism”; that evolution has little to do with human nature as it currently exists, and that sociobiology is a little more than collection of arbitrary stories about how the tiger got his stripes or the elephant his trunk. 

All of which is again mistaken.  Take the idea of human sexuality as uniquely non-procreative.  In fact, Volker Sommer, an anthropologist at University College London, has documented homosexuality in gorillas, langur monkeys, and macaques as well as in flamingoes and certain breeds of geese.[4]  Bonobo chimpanzees, also known as pygmy chimps, are famous for engaging in all sorts of non-procreative sexual behavior between and among males, females, and children in order to foster social bonds and resolve conflicts.[5]  Autoeroticism has been documented in lions, bats, walruses, baboons, sheep, deer, warthogs, and hyenas.[6] 

As for Steiner’s wholesale dismissal of an entire field of scientific inquiry – this while citing (in a footnote) no authority other than the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, whose principal work appeared more than a half-century ago[7] – as Kipling-eque tomfoolery, any such conclusion is staggering.  Whatever Wilson’s misdeeds may have been, there is not the slightest doubt that the study of the evolution of human behavior has emerged as one of the most exciting and fruitful areas in all anthropology.  

How could it be otherwise given that the vast behavioral differences between homo sapiens and chimpanzees, their closest living relative?  Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an award-winning anthropologist at the University of California – Davis, begins her 2009 book, Mothers and Others, with a thought experiment.  Observing hundreds of people murmuring “excuse me” and “sorry” as they squeeze onto a crowded jetliner, she can’t help wondering: “What if I were traveling with a planeload of chimpanzees?”  Given the ultra-violent nature of chimp society, her answer is clear: 

Anyone of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, with the baby still breathing and unmaimed.  Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles.   Compressing so many highly impulsive strangers into a tight space would be a recipe for mayhem.[8] 

So how is that one species of African ape is peaceful and cooperative in such circumstances while another is violent and anarchic?  Is it because of some divine spark as in Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel?  Or is it because of the dreaded e-word – evolution? 

The answer is obvious.  When hominin and chimpanzee lines diverged as recently as six million years ago, social development was a central part of the process.  Engels was clearly on to something when he noted in his 1876 essay, “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,” that: 

[T]he development of labor necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by multiplying cases of mutual support, joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual.  In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to one another.  The need led to the creation of its organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by means of gradually increased modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate letter after another. 

Rather than separate and distinct, physical and cultural development were interwoven in that language required anatomical modifications in the form of an improved larynx so that words and sentences could emerge.  It was not first one thing and then another, but a dialectical interplay in which both elements evolved in tandem.  Where Engels emphasized bipedalism and the opposable thumb, Hrdy stresses another aspect of development, which is to say the emergence of hominins as “cooperative breeders.”  She notes that an orangutan, gorilla, and chimp baby is:

...inseparable from his mother, remaining in intimate front-to-front contact 100 percent of the day and night.  The earliest a wild chimpanzee mother has ever been observed to voluntarily let her baby out of her grasp is three and a half months.  

But among Hadza hunter-gatherers in modern-day Tanzania, a baby is: 

...held by grandmothers, great-aunts, older siblings, fathers, and even visitors from neighboring groups.  Other group members are so attracted by this new addition to the community that Hadza newborns are held by alloparents 85 percent of the time in the first days right after birth.[9] 

Is this because chimps love their babies more than human mothers do?  No, it’s because anthropological field work makes it clear that hunter-gatherer bands are so tightly knit that mothers can be confident that infants will be as safe in other hands as her own.  Hrdy notes that infanticide among gorillas and chimps is rife: 

[B]ecause females typically leave their natal kin to breed in other communities, they have to worry about unrelated and potentially infanticidal females as well.  This is especially true of highly omnivorous common chimpanzees, who eat baby gazelles and colobus monkeys when they can get them.  Baby chimpanzees are a no less delectable source of proteins and lipids.[10] 

A chimp mother is afraid to leave her baby alone for fear another chimp will eat it.  Mothers and Others tells of a team of primatologists studying forest chimps in Uganda in 2006.  The group: 

...noticed an unfamiliar female moving in from another community ... carrying a week-old infant.  The pair was attacked by six resident females.  Five had infants of their own, clinging tight to their mothers as they charged.  Screaming and bleeding, the strange female was no match for this xenophobic consortium.  As her attackers caught hold and pounded on her back, she crouched low to the ground, shielding her baby. ...  The alpha female wrested the baby away, only to lose it to another female who snatched it from her and delivered a lethal, neck-spanning bite.[11] 

Such behavior is not without a modicum of Darwinian logic.  Chimp babies are tasty, apparently, while chasing away a female interloper reduces competition for food.  But cooperative child-rearing turned out to be more advantageous in that it allowed hominins to cooperate by raising offspring with brains that would eventually grow to three or four times the size of chimp brains even though such children require more food, nurturing, and training and were slower to develop and mature.  While other African apes remained trapped in tropical micro-zones, homo erectus, which emerged some two million years ago, consequently developed a socio-technological toolkit that enabled it to leave Africa and venture as far afield as China, Indonesia, and New Guinea.  As Engels observed in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State ((1884), cooperative labor not only provided for the production of food, tools, and dwellings, but for “the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.”  

Cooperative child-rearing and food-gathering led to bigger brains, which led to better tools, bigger populations, and widening fields of activity.  Is all this nothing more than “just so” stories?  Chris Knight, a Marxist anthropologist formerly at University College London and now a mainstay of London’s Radical Anthropology Group, argued in his 1991 book, Blood Relations, that cooperative sexual relations were no less important than cooperative child-rearing and labor.  Indeed, he theorizes that woman engaged in a Lysistrata-like “female strike” in early hominin history in which the goal was to hammer out a social contract in which men would provide food in exchange for sex and children.  Knight thus declares: 

We begin, then, not with the supposed sudden emergence of male sexual generosity and self-restraint – as in the origins models of Freud and Lévi-Strauss – but ... with female child-rearing and economic priorities, female ultimate determination of social structure, and female sexual self-restraint in women’s own direct material interests.  From this, the incest taboo, food taboos, and other basic features of the human cultural configuration will be derived [emphasis in the original].[12] 

This is a far cry from the image that so many of us grew with of a primitive man in a bear skin dragging a woman by the hair home to his cave.  In a fascinating aside, Knight observes that where the orangutan menstrual cycle lasts 31 days while that of the common chimp lasts 37, the human menstrual cycle averages 29.5, which happens to correlate almost exactly with the lunar cycle.  This alone suggests that human biology evolved in such a way as to promote a monthly cycle of ritual and celebration.[13]  Ritual, culture, sex, food, fertility, and biology all came together in a single powerful package. 

Is this biological determinism?  Yes, provided, that is, that biology is properly understood as a complex interaction between species, environment, culture, and the struggle to survive. 

Steiner’s dismissal of evolutionary theory cuts the developmental thread, so to speak, enabling him to argue in an a-historic way that sex and reproduction have reached the point where they are now effectively divorced.  We thus get statements to the effect that “human sexuality has developed a relative autonomy from the reproductive instinct” or “that ‘sex’ understood in the broader manner introduced by Freud is a mediating level of human behavior that exists between the strictly biological level of ‘instinct’ and the strictly cultural level of ‘gender.’” 

This may be Freudianism, but it is not Marxism.  As Engels observed, sexual reproduction, social reproduction, and technology developed in ways that were not autonomous, but highly integrated.  The idea that biological instinct occurs at one end of the human spectrum and gender at the other, with sex mediating in between, smacks of liberal compartmentalization and eclecticism.  To be sure, making babies and engaging in other intellectual or cultural pursuits may seem like a far cry from one another.  But it is precisely this seeming separation that makes the process so powerful when a wide range of cultural and technological developments come tother to foster human self-reproduction.  

Postmodernists like Butler have it backwards when they urge people to free themselves by casting off biology.  People free themselves not by casting it off, but by mastering it in the same way they master nature in general.  It is what gives them the scientific tools needed to explore new fields and question the previously unquestionable, which is why society has been immersed in an unprecedented gender debate for two decades or more.  If a gothic cathedral seems to soar, it is not because it defies gravity, but because, thanks to pointed arches and flying buttresses, it uses gravity to seemingly rise above it.  By the same token, human beings use their mastery of biology via modern medicine and the like to seemingly rise above it as well. 

Human liberation arises through science, not in opposition to it.  It is meanwhile astonishing to see an attack on Darwinian theory in the name of Marxism.  And it is no less dismaying to see an attempt to wall off sexual and social reproduction from one another in a way that goes counter to the essential unity of human development.  It was this unity that Marx was referring to when he said that the goal of socialism was to enable man to “think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true sun.”  Moving about oneself in such a manner means learning to see sexual reproduction, social reproduction, scientific development, and the like as a unified whole.  Where bourgeois liberalism seeks to compartmentalize such functions, Marxism seeks to bind them together more tightly than ever.

---

[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 164.

[2] William Bechtel and Robert C. Richardson, “Vitalism,” in E. Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), available at https://web.archive.org/web/20110515081858/http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/philbio/vitalism.htm.

[3] Ibid.

[4] See his lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjd7hMhoeAM&t=1857s.

[5] Natalie Angier, “In the Bonobo World, Female Camaraderie Prevails,” New York Times, Sept. 10, 2016.

[6] Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 209-10.

[7] Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap, 1975).

[8] Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009) 3.

[9] Ibid., 68, 76.

[10] Ibid., 233-34.

[11] Ibid., 235.

[12] Chris Knight, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1991), 153.

[13] Ibid., 215, 248.

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