 |
| Early hominid life on the savannah |
Note: This is the Third and final installment of my response to Dan Lazare’s polemic against me, Meeting Judith Butler halfway: Science, Darwin, and adaptation to postmodernism. Part Two, Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism Part Two: The Darwin Wars was published on April 19, 2026. Part One, Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism Part One: Sexuality, Mechanism and Vitalism was published on April 9, 2026.
In his
article Lazare makes a number of patently false statements attributing to me
positions I do not hold. He also fails to respond to the bulk of my essay, Marxism,
psychoanalysis and human sexuality. That essay was in turn written in response to
his article, Materialism
and Gender Theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck. I
challenged the theoretical conclusions Lazare drew in that essay about gender
theory, psychology, human sexuality and evolutionary theory. I am continuing
the method I adopted in Part One and Part Two of responding to the topics while
relegating the specific arguments raised by Lazare to the footnotes wherever
possible.
The emergence of Radical Anthropology
Finally
we come to the version of Evolutionary Psychology championed by some
contemporary radicals and Marxists, namely the Radical Anthropology Group (RAG)
founded by Chris Knight. According to
the RAG website[1]
Knight was a radical activist teaching anthropology at Morley College when his
position was terminated in 1984. Knight and his students then proceeded to
found an independent organization devoted to the radical version of
anthropology Knight was teaching. Eventually Knight found another position,
teaching anthropology at the University of East London until 2009 when “He was
sacked by UEL’s corporate management …for his role in organising and
publicising demonstrations against the G20 in April.” The group that coalesced
around Knight incudes the anthropologists Lionel Sims, Ian Watts, Camilla
Power, Isabel Cardigos and Charles Whitehead.
What
characterizes the work of the RAG is their commitment to a radical left version
of Evolutionary Psychology. They share the commitment of their more
conservative Evolutionary Psychology colleagues to the thesis that we can gain
an understanding of human behavior by studying the Darwinian evolutionary
strategies that were developed by early humans as well as our closest non-human
relatives. At the same time they rejected the right wing models of human
behavior that were at the heart of Wilson’s Sociobiology and drove the work of
Pinker, Harris and others, models that stressed the role of a male-dominated
society founded on aggression and competition. Instead they maintained that the
origins of human nature were to be found in prehistoric societies centered
around females that practiced a form of what could be called primitive
communism. These hypothesized structures centered social bonds that made
possible cooperative child rearing without which our early hunter gatherer
ancestors would never have survived. Rules regulating sex and the sharing of
food that were inherited over the generations guided the members of these
hunter gatherer groups. This narrative was presented as scientific facts
gathered from studies in anthropology and primatology. Supposedly, such facts
demonstrated that human nature, if it were allowed to run its course unimpeded,
leads naturally not to capitalism, as previous Social Darwinists had
maintained, but to communism. In assessing the work of this group one should
make a distinction, always important, between their strictly scientific
research and their broader theories about human nature. Just as we can
acknowledge the strictly scientific work of E. O. Wilson while taking issue
with his broader vision – Wilson did a great deal of original research in
entomology and was considered the world’s leading experts on insects -- so we
can acknowledge the scientific work of the radical anthropologists while
challenging their reductionist understanding of human nature. A form of left
wing reductionism, although more sophisticated than the crude fantasies of
Stephen Pinker, remains a form of reductionism. Even if their narrative about
the human origins in a society of primitive communism were found to be true – and
that is a big “if” -- how much insight does that provide us about our
contemporary culture?
The
radical anthropologists turn to the work of the evolutionary anthropologist
Sara Blaffer Hrdy as a kind of starting point for their own work. The main
thesis of her work is that cooperative breeding was a trait that distinguished
early humans from other apes, was driven by the necessity of adapting to the
harsh conditions of life on the savannah and made it possible to nurture very
vulnerable but complex infants, thereby creating the conditions for a
leap in the cognitive ability of our ancestors. These are important scientific
findings, revealing that cooperation is built into our biological makeup as
humans.[2] But that in itself tells us very little about
why incredibly destructive wars have plagued humanity since the dawn of
civilization and today threaten the very existence of our species. And the reason for that is that we are not
only biological creatures but social creatures and the economic, political,
cultural and ideological dynamics of our lives have long since overridden the
biological ones. Man’s second nature, our social being, while never freeing
itself from our animal nature, overwhelms it and drives us past it either in a
progressive or retrogressive direction. Richard Lewontin provided an example of
this:
The
reductionism of sociobiology leads it to characterize social behavior as
nothing but the collection of individual behaviors, and social limitations as
individual limitations writ large. Yet this reductionism misses an essential
truth about human social activity - that social organization can actually
negate individual limitations. I mean this negation in much more than the sense
that ten people can lift a weight ten times as great as can one person. None of
us can fly by flapping our arms. That is a biological limitation. Yet we do fly
as a consequence of the social organization that has given rise to airplanes,
airfields, pilots, controllers, fuel, metallurgy, hydrodynamic theory, and
organized economic activity. It is not society that flies, however, but
individuals. Thus, the constraints on individual human beings have been negated
by social activity, and they have become new individual human beings with new
properties and abilities. (And constraints. I cannot bring myself to kill
another human being, but I could, had I been raised differently.)[3]
It may
seem superfluous to make such an obvious point but it is necessary in light of
the relentless campaign of the biological reductionists. Another point that needs to be made is that
those disciplines that we employ to comprehend the dynamics of man’s social
being, including historical materialism, cannot be reduced to the disciplines
of biology or chemistry. Perhaps our
ancestors 100,000 years ago were relatively speaking “peaceful”. But the issue in dispute is whether in any
meaningful sense modern humans can be considered peaceful as a result of this
historical legacy. The most we can say is
that our biological heritage provides us with the capacity to be “peaceful” for
sure, but, contrary to the biological determinists, that fact does not
determine our destiny. Only a
fundamental transformation of our social organization can bring about a
peaceful society.
The
“just so stories” of Chris Knight
 |
| Chris Knight |
What of
the theories of Chris Knight, the founder of Radical Anthropology? Knight is
the author of a radical theory of human origins that focuses on the role of
females reigning in the aggressive behavior of males. His theories are given
enthusiastic and uncritical support by a number of radicals and Marxists. For
instance take this example:
…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.[4]
Knight’s
theory of a female “sex strike” that propelled a “social revolution” in ancient
society and overturned a war-driven patriarchy, giving way to a more humane and
cooperative culture, is certainly an interesting hypothesis but exactly what
evidence is there to support it?
Not
much, according to the late English Marxist Chris Harman. He wrote a
devastating critique of Knight’s work more than three decades ago. To quote
Harman,
Every
generation of Marxists has to fight its battle against those who produce the
latest proofs – strangely enough, always the same old proofs – that Marxism is
finished. But we have also had, repeatedly, to fight another, even more
tiresome battle against people who claim to be on our own side. Ever since Herr
Professor Dühring beguiled half the intellectuals of the German socialist
movement with his ‘revolution in science’ in the 1880s, Marxists have had to
expose a series of intellectual quacks who have tried to present their pet
systems of myths and half-truths as the latest thing in scientific advance.
Chris
Knight’s book about the origins of human culture falls straight into the same
tradition of quackery. Every chapter is headed by a quote from Marx. But the
intellectual basis of the book owes little to Marx’s insistence that social
production is the key to the development of humanity. Rather Knight
acknowledges his debt to: ‘sociobiology’s achievements’ in seeing that ‘what
animates ... the flesh and blood individual ... are ... genes ... whose only
law is to survive ...’; to the mystical poets Peter Redgrove and Penelope
Sharp, whose ‘style and tone’, he tells us, is ‘Jungian’; to those ‘involved in
the Greenham Common anti-missile campaigns of the early 1980s’ who refused ‘to
collaborate in the whole masculinist political set up ...’; and to his ‘political
friends’ which include prominent Labour MP Ken Livingstone and two lesser known
luminaries of the London Labour left, Keith Veness and Graham Bash.[5]
Harman
continues,
Most pop
sociobiologists do not go beyond the 17th century mechanical materialist,
Thomas Hobbes, who described life for humans in the ‘state of nature’ as
‘nasty, brutish and short’, with a ‘war of all against all’ making the
development of civilisation impossible until people were forcibly compelled to
behave themselves. Knight is no exception. He argues ‘genetic imperatives’
necessarily caused continual, bitter, bloody competition among our primate
ancestors. Their behaviour, like that of present day primates, he describes as
like ‘primitive capitalists’, their battles with each other as reminiscent ‘of
some of Lenin’s descriptions of inter-imperialist rivalry’. And this prevented
any real development of culture among our ancestors until about 50,000 or
60,000 years ago when co-operation replaced conflict.
His
‘theory’ is a Just So story about how such a change could have occurred –
instead of telling how the elephant got its trunk, it claims to tell how humans
got culture. It depends on adding a number of dubious claims to the initial
postulate of endless conflict.
Harman
then examines each of Knight’s claims and finds them to be unsupported by the
evidence. To cite one example that
Harman brings up,
Take
Knight’s initial presupposition, the alleged, state-of-nature, bloody
competition between male primates over food and females. Knight justifies
himself by reference to Solly Zukerman’s study of the chimps in London Zoo in
the early 1930s. But there have been scores of further studies since, many
based in the wild, which give a very different picture. They reveal
differences of social behaviour between different ape species as great as those
between any of them and modern humans. And in many cases there are
far more instances of cooperation between individuals than conflict.
Similar
criticisms have been levelled against Knight by others. Writing in an anarchist
journal, an anonymous author with the pen name of “Baboon”, who obviously had a
great deal of knowledge of anthropology, made the following points,
I've no
doubt that menstruation was an important element and that the moon played a
significant role in hunter-gatherer society and, possibly, the former rituals
involved the use of red ochre. But to elevate this assertion to an importance
of a motor force of change was ridiculous and unscientific. I spoke to agree
with the importance of primitive communism as a concept and the qualitative
leap that Homo Sapiens represented, but denounced his ignorant dismissal of
pre-Sapiens species as "animals". I also pointed out that his
‘irrefutable' proof of the use of red ochre by Sapiens predated this species by
hundreds of thousands of years. It was used by Homo Heidelbergensis 300,000
years ago, by everyone's admission by Neanderthals, in France, Spain and Czechoslovakia,
and even findings in the Olduvai beds of Africa date from one million years
ago. My inference was that its use in hunter gatherer society was more to do
with life and death (red ochre is probably the "red earth" in Genesis
from which God created Adam).[6]
Knight
claimed that he was building on the legacy of Engels’ work in this area from
his treatise on The Family, Private property and the State.[7]
But Knight does not engage with one of Engels’ most important insights, the
part played by labor in the humanization from apes to man. That criticism was made in a follow-up
article to the criticism of Baboon, where the author wrote,
One of
Baboon's most important criticisms of Knight's thesis is that, apart from a
couple of references in the book that are not followed up, he seems to show no
interest at all in what for Marx and Engels was an absolutely central element
in the emergence of the specifically human consciousness of the world: not only
the question of reproduction, but the question of production, of labour, and
the social relations which permit its development. Indeed, when Baboon raised
the question of tool-making as a factor in the evolution of human
consciousness, Knight described this as an "anti-woman" approach (as
though the use of tools were the exclusive privilege of males). It is here that
Knight seems to slip into a purely feminist approach, as there can hardly be a
serious marxist account of human origins that doesn't at least acknowledge and
assimilate the contribution of Marx, Engels, Pannekoek and others on "the
role of labour in the transition from ape to man.[8]
It does
not require any special expertise in anthropology to acknowledge that Harman’s
and subsequent critiques of Chris Knight’s theory is devastating. At the very
least Knight’s theory should have been met with critical questioning rather
than the uncritical and enthusiastic adoption that we find among a number of
Knight’s radical supporters.
The idea
of a “sex strike” followed by a “human revolution” that overthrew patriarchy
(Knight even makes reference to the now discredited theory of an original
“matriarchy”) followed again by a “counter-revolution” re-establishing
patriarchy, smacks of an extrapolation from the radical politics Knight was
familiar with in his London neighborhood to the field of anthropology. In that context the radical activists envisioned
a strike action, leading to a general
strike, which in turn would trigger an insurrection that would topple the
existing order. One can understand why a
radical activist would be tempted to read into ancient society a confirmation
of his political vision, but that does not make such a hypothesis science.
The real human revolution: The emergence of language and symbolization
All of
which is not to say that there is nothing useful in the research that looks at
animal behavior as a source of human behavior. There is a continuity between
the behavior of our non-human ancestors and homo sapiens. That is certainly part of the truth and the
work of anthropologists like Hrdy and the primatologist Jane Goodall
demonstrates that. But there is also a sharp discontinuity. There is clearly
something unique about the human animal that does not exist in other species
and it is not just an incremental difference but a qualitative one. This is the part that trips up the Radical
Anthropologists. If collective breeding
is a trait that humans share with some of our non-human relatives – and by
extension are inherited from a now extinct common ancestor – then it must
follow that this is not the specific trait that distinguishes humans from
animals.
 |
| Sara Blaffer Hrdy |
But
there was indeed a “human revolution” and while collective breeding certainly
paved the way for it, that was not it.
To explore this topic further we need to consider the work of the
anthropologist Ian Tattersall. He maintains that the unique trait that marked
humans was language and the ability to symbolize. Thus Tattersall writes,
By any
standard we human beings are unusual creatures. Just for a start, our bizarre
upright locomotion is reflected in a whole laundry list of physical
peculiarities that range from strange globular heads, precariously balanced
above sinuous vertical spines, to a dismal propensity for hernias, wrenched
knees, and fallen arches. Still, if pressed to identify the one single feature
that most sharply distinguishes us from the rest of the living world, most of
us would probably opt for our ability to produce and understand language, a
curious form of communication in which a limited vocabulary of vocal or
gestural symbols can generate an unlimited number of readily recognizable
meanings.[9]
In his
major book on this topic Tattersall elaborates,
Our
ancestors made an almost unimaginable transition from a nonsymbolic,
nonlinguistic way of processing and communicating information about the world
to the symbolic and linguistic condition we enjoy today. It is a qualitative
leap in cognitive state unparalleled in history. Indeed, as I’ve said, the only
reason we have for believing that such a leap could ever have been made, is
that it was made. And it seems to have been made well after the acquisition by
our species of its distinctive modern biological form.
The
earliest firm intimations we have that a symbolic sensibility was astir among
populations of newly evolved Homo sapiens come from Africa or its immediate
environs. The oldest of them are also a bit arguable, consisting principally of
suggestions that at Skhul, over 100 thousand years ago, small marine snail
shells were already being pierced for stringing as beads, while lumps of
pigment were heated, presumably to change their color from yellow into a more
attractive orange or red. The shell beads are particularly interesting, because
personal ornamentation using necklaces or bracelets (and, for that matter,
bodily coloration using pigments) has usually had deep symbolic significance
among historically documented peoples. How you dress and decorate yourself
signifies your identity as a member of a group, or of a class or a profession
or of an age-cohort within your group. Still, the early putative evidence for
this kind of thing is slender at this point: two shells perforated (possibly by
natural causes) through their weakest points at Skhul, and a single shell at an
Aterian site in Algeria of uncertain age. At both places, however, the shells
were of a species that had to have been collected far away along the
Mediterranean shore. This implies they were special objects to their
possessors, specifically brought in through long-distance exchange.[10]
 |
| Ian Tattersall |
What
Tattersall is saying is that man is a linguistic animal because he or she is a
symbolizing animal. And as Tattersall indicates, language is one means of
expressing our ability to symbolize but it is not the only one as the
production of decorative beads indicates. Indeed it is an open question among
anthropologists whether symbolic activity preceded spoken language or developed
conjointly with it. Tattersall explains the origin of language from a Gouldian
point of view and rejects the thesis of the sociobiologists who see no further
than the function of language to improve communication within a group, thereby
assisting its survival in a hostile environment. But communication within a group requires
only a small set of vocal and gestural actions, which is indeed what we see
among the higher primates. It does not
require the symbolizing role that language (and other symbolic activity)
performs among humans. Human language allows for an infinite array of meanings,
far more than required for survival. Part of Tattersall’s argument is a defense
of Noam Chomsky’s theory of language involving a “universal grammar”. It would
take us too far afield to discuss Chomsky’s theory here and it is not necessary
to defend it in order to agree with Tattersall’s main point, that the
acquisition of language was a cognitive revolution that went far beyond the
necessities of group communication and sometimes even could come into conflict
with those requirements. Tattersall
writes, in reviewing a book written by a biological determinist,
He [the
author Steven Mithen, whose book, The Language Puzzle, is being
reviewed] also dwells on the tendency of languages to diversify, finding lots
of reasons why this should occur despite the resulting barriers to
communication. What he does not consider is the question of why, if selection
reigns supreme and language is all about communication, those barriers should
not be selected out. Is it possible that, in such an intensely social species,
language is somehow more important as a badge of group membership than as a way
of communicating about the physical and social environment? Or might there be
some merit in Chomsky’s speculation that language’s most important role is its
internalized one?[11]
What is
distinctly human about sex?
This
leads us back to a point of contention between what I would consider a
dialectical approach to human sexuality and the kind of mechanical materialist
approach championed by the followers of the radical anthropologists, namely the
claim that human sexual behavior is not all that different from that of other
animals.
Followers
of the radical anthropologists cite the
work of Volker Sommer demonstrating that chimpanzees, bonobos and even birds
practice homosexuality and are therefore just as diverse in their sexual drives
as humans. This is meant to reinforce the idea that human sexuality is more or
less dictated by the biological impulse to reproduce and if there is some
variation to human sexual expression it is no more than can be found among
animals who are nevertheless destined to follow
the Darwinian impulse to reproduce.
Now it
is true that certain species of animals can follow the diversity of human
sexual expression, but only in a very attenuated form. The supposed
similarity of human sexuality to that of other animal species is brought up to
confuse the profound difference that lies between them. That difference is
located in the symbolic nature of human sexuality, something that is not found
among other animal species. Thus humans exhibit a range of sexual behavior
that, like the meanings found in language, are practically infinite. For
humans, sexual behavior is as much symbolic as it is purely driven by instinct.
And that is the significance of a practice like the shoe fetish. Shoe fetishism
is one example among thousands of the symbolic nature of human sexual expression.
Monkeys may engage in homosexual activity but they do not create a gay culture.
Nor do they engage in purely symbolic forms of sexual activity such as
sadomasochism and shoe fetishism.
On
killing Freud again
It was
the symbolic nature of human sexuality that was the great insight of Freud.
That is one reason why the biological determinists, both left and right wing,
wish to excommunicate Freud. As far as Freud’s right wing critics are
concerned, the theory and practice of psychoanalysis founded by Freud is
“unscientific” and a poor “return on investment.”[12] Left wing opponents of Freud will simply
contend that Freudianism “is not part of Marxism”.[13]
But
those who wish to exclude by fiat the work of Freud from the legacy of Marxism
are in fact going against a long-standing Marxist tradition of respect and
engagement, if not always agreement, with Freud and his theories. The idea that
“Freudianism is not part of Marxism” was certainly not Trotsky’s view. He
respected Freudian psychoanalysis and even recommended it to members of his own
family. Evidence of this is replete in
his Notebooks from the 1930’s,
But by
itself the method of psychoanalysis, taking as its point of departure the
‘autonomy’ of psychological phenomena, in no way contradicts materialism. Quite
the contrary, it is precisely dialectical materialism that prompts us to the
idea that the psyche could not even be formed unless it played an autonomous,
that is, within certain limits, an independent role in the life of the
individual and the species.[14]
Nor was
it the position of the Bolsheviks who encouraged psychoanalytic therapy in the
early years of the Soviet Union before it was shut down by the Stalinist
bureaucracy.[15]
Not was it the position of the Freudo-Marxists like Erich Fromm, Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich in his Marxist period or subsequent writers such as Bertell Ollman, Michael Löwy and many others.
The
dismissal of Freud is a common trope among biological determinists as well,
including the Radical Anthropologist Chris Knight as well as Volker Sommer and
the leaders of Sociobiology, Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett and Pinker. It should be
understood however that this rejection of Freud is not based on any serious
study of Freud or his work. Rather for them “Freud” is just a stand-in for
psychology as such. Any version of psychology, not just Freud’s, that does not
conform to their reductionist model of human behavior is illegitimate. They are
part of a long-standing tradition of Freud-bashing that has become obligatory
in mainstream culture. Jonathan Lear identified this phenomenon decades ago,
From Time to the New York Times, Freud-bashing
has gone from an argument to a movement. In just the past few weeks Basic Books
has brought out a long-winded tirade with what it no doubt hopes will be the
sensational title Why Freud Was Wrong; and the New York Review of
Books has collected some of its already published broadsides against Freud
into a new book.[16]
If there
is less ink spilled about Freud today than there was four decades ago it is
only because the Freud-bashers think they have won the battle.
The
reductionist model for the unification of knowledge according to E.O. Wilson
The
Sociobiologists/Evolutionary Psychologists always come back with the retort
that what their critics see as reductionism is in reality an attempt to bring
all the sciences bound together into a unified whole. That was the original
vision of Wilson which he articulated in his book Consilience: The Unity of
Knowledge. In that work Wilson makes absolutely clear that his vision of
unifying the sciences is a program of pure reductionism of all the social
science to biology, He makes his
contempt for social science, as well as Marx and Freud quite clear, writing:
As a rule they [social scientists] ignore the findings of
scientific psychology and biology. That is part of the reason, for example, why
social scientists overestimated the strength of communist rule and
underestimated the strength of ethnic hostility. They were genuinely startled
when the Soviet empire collapsed, popping the cap off the superpower pressure
cooker, and were surprised again when one result of this release of energies
was the breakout of ethnic strife and nationalistic wars in the spheres of
diminished Russian influence. The theorists have consistently misjudged Muslim
fundamentalism, which is religion inflamed by ethnicity. At home in America,
they not only failed to foresee the collapse of the welfare state, but still
cannot agree on its causes. In short, social scientists as a whole have paid
little attention to the foundations of human nature, and they have had almost
no interest in its deep origins.
The social sciences are hampered in this last regard by the
residue of strong historical precedent. Ignorance of the natural sciences by design
was a strategy fashioned by the founders, most notably Emile Durkheim, Karl
Marx, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud, and their immediate followers. They aimed
to isolate their nascent disciplines from the foundational sciences of biology
and psychology, which at the inception of the social sciences were in any case
too primitive to be of clear relevance. This stance was fruitful at first. It
allowed scholars to search widely for patterns in culture and social
organization unencumbered by the patronage of the natural sciences, and to
compose such laws of social action as the prima facie evidence demanded. But
once the pioneering era ended, the theorists were mistaken not to include biology
and psychology. It was no longer a virtue to avoid the roots of human nature.[17]
This
long-winded statement by Wilson is quite revealing and uncovers the real agenda
behind the slogan “Unity of Knowledge”.
Initially the idea of the different sciences working together on first
reading sounds great. What rational
person would oppose that? But once you unpack his statement its sinister
implications become clear. Wlson is proposing a hierarchy of the sciences in
which biology as he understands it occupies the most fundamental layer. Sitting on top of biology and directly
dependent on it is what he calls “scientific psychology”, another term for the pseudo-science of Evolutionary
Psychology. After that stand all the
other layers of what used to be known as the “social sciences” that are
identified by way of the individuals associated with their names: sociology
(Durkheim), economics (Marx), psychology (Freud) and cultural anthropology
(Boas). His point is that none of the
social sciences have ever gotten beyond the level of a child-like and naïve
common sense approach and thus cannot be considered genuine sciences. And as
for philosophy, it does not even rate a mention. However we get a clear idea of what Wilson
thinks of philosophy in remarks he makes elsewhere,
Philosophers have labored off and on for over two thousand
years to explain consciousness. Of course they have, it’s their job. Innocent
of biology, however, they have for the most part understandably gotten nowhere.
I don’t believe it too harsh to say that the history of philosophy when boiled
down consists mostly of failed models of the brain.[18]
What we
get therefore is a dismissal of philosophy altogether, very much in the
tradition of logical positivism. (The logical positivists famously said that
the traditional problems philosophy was concerned with such as “what is justice?”
or “what is beauty?” are not really philosophical problems at all. They can
either be solved through normal scientific observation once their imprecise
wording is unpacked or they are simply nonsense without any possible solution.)
Yet Wilson makes an exception for a group of philosophers who have embraced his
reductionist model of knowledge. He praises the work of Daniel Dennett for
instance,
A few of the modern neurophilosophers such as … Daniel
Dennett have made a splendid effort to interpret the findings of neuroscience
research as these become available. They have helped others to understand, for
example, the ancillary nature of morality and rational thought.
Wilson
also makes the point that only a subjective idealist of the postmodernist variety
could possibly be a critic of his reductionist outlook,
Others, especially those of poststructuralist bent, are more
retrograde. They doubt that the “reductionist” or “objectivist” program of the
brain researchers will ever succeed in explaining the core of consciousness.
Needless
to say Wilson’s accusations against opponents of reductionism still find an echo
today even from left wing sources.[19]
The
unified approach to human sexuality: dialectics or goulash?
How then
do we unify our knowledge from different disciplines in our understanding of
human sexuality?
One
answer comes in the form of the following piece of world-salad from a supporter
of the Radical Anthropologists:
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.[20]
It is
not accidental that this description of a “unified whole” hearkens back to
Wilson’s conception of unifying all areas of knowledge by reducing all of
psychology and the social sciences to biology.
But this so called “unified whole”
has no resemblance to a dialectical whole in which each part is defined
in terms of its relation to the whole and what is considered a whole is
relative to the place it occupies within a hierarchy of wholes each exhibiting
new and emergent properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of wholes
on a lower level of this hierarchy.
Trotsky put it thus in the quote we have previously cited,
…it is precisely dialectical materialism that prompts us to
the idea that the psyche could not even be formed unless it played an
autonomous, that is, within certain limits, an independent role in the life of
the individual and the species.
Or to
extend the thought, it means that biology cannot be reduced to chemistry,
psychology cannot be reduced to biology, and the politics of a country cannot
be reduced to economics even if all these areas are interconnected.
Writing
against the reductionism of the Russian psychologist Pavlov, Trotsky made this
point explicitly,
Each science rests on the laws of other sciences only in the
so-called final instance. But at the same time, the separation of the sciences
from one another is determined precisely by the fact that each science covers a
particular field of phenomena, i.e. a field of complex combinations of
elementary phenomena and laws that require a special approach, special research
technique, special hypotheses and methods.[21]
It also
means that if you are examining human sexual behavior it has to be analyzed in
its own terms as the unique whole with its own emergent properties that are
guided largely by our symbolization drive and not confused with the instinctual
sexual practices of non-human animals.
The latter approach replaces dialectics with goulash.
Epilogue:
The new anti-humanist synthesis: the convergence of biological determinism with
biological eliminationism
“We are
survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish
molecules known as genes.”
-
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
“As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears
that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.”
-
Elon Musk,
quote on X, 2025
The
Darwin Wars that began in the 1970’s never really ended. But they have taken on
new forms in the past three decades. For one thing the reductionist model for
unifying knowledge proposed by Wilson has been adopted by official education
policy makers, although in a manner he did not foresee. The last 30 years has
seen the progressive destruction of the humanities in higher education. This was driven by the rationale that the
education system needs to be “reformed” to be more “scientific”. This was
coupled with criticism that the humanities represent a “poor return on
investment”.
At the
same time, the guiding philosophy of our culture has turned increasingly in an
anti-humanist direction. That is the import of the rise to prominence of the philosophical
doggerel arising out of the Tech billionaires from Silicone Valley such as
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Their
philosophical spokesmen of the Dark Enlightenment have been telling us
that being human is a brake on progress and we need to shed our humanity in the
service of a higher technological utopia. [22]
To be
fair to Wilson, that was never his intention.
As he got older he became very aware of issues relating to climate
change and biodiversity. He hoped that his vision of unifying knowledge would
lead, not to the extinction of the humanities, but to its alignment with what
he conceived of as “science”. Thus he
wrote,
Science and the humanities, it is true, are
fundamentally different from each other in what they say and do. But they are
complementary in origin, and they arise from the same creative processes in the
human brain. If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with
the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an
infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.[23]
But,
despite the intention of Wilson, mechanical materialism has a logic of its own and
in the context of a declining bourgeoisie who have long since abandoned any
vestige of humanism, the only direction such an ideology could go was toward an
anti-humanism.
A philosophy
that denies human agency, that reduces science to that which can be measured
and controlled, inevitably turns into an anti-humanism despite the best
intentions of their advocates. And that is how we end up with the paradox that
those who affirm the primacy of our biological selves in the end find
themselves in agreement with a technological accelerationist like Musk who
thinks our human biology is an unnecessary though temporary burden to be
discarded as soon as the new technology makes possible our post-human,
non-biological existence.
Humanism
as a distinct social and philosophical movement first emerged in Italy during
the Renaissance. (Of course there were
predecessors to humanism in the ancient world.) What was characteristic of Renaissance
humanism was its assertion of human agency and freedom of the individual against
dogma and ecclesiastical authority and a universalism that reflected a tolerance
of other cultures. It also advocated a cultivation of the intellect in all
spheres of knowledge and art and a turn to the classics of Greece and Rome. The humanist impulse was given a new direction
with the advent of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Humanism was infused with the advances made
in the natural and social science and became synonymous with the notion of
progress and the ideals of “liberty, equality and fraternity” by which the French Revolution ushered in the
modern world. By the mid-19th
century the bourgeoisie was no longer capable of articulating a humanist
vision. That did not happen all at once,
but eventually the bourgeoisie abandoned all pretense of espousing anything
remotely akin to humanism. Rather,
various forms of anti-humanism, of which Nietzsche is rightly considered to be
the godfather, took hold. The legacy of
the humanism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was carried forward by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels and their followers.
Today, as the bourgeoisie expresses its predatory nature more and more
openly it is left to Marxists to be the most consistent defenders of humanism. A key part of our
responsibility is to support the efforts of
scientists who defend the humanist tradition, against those who would
subordinate the sciences to the dictates of a capitalist oligarchy. That is
why we support those scientists, who, like the late Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard Lewontin, devoted themselves to exposing the anti-humanism and false
science of various ideologies that claimed to be “scientific”.
NOTES
[1] Lazare is an uncritical booster of this group
as expressed in his article, Meeting
Judith Butler halfway. The RAG website is
http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/about
[2] Lazare, in his response to my critique,
devotes several long paragraphs to the topic of “cooperative breeding”, citing the work of Sara Blaffer Hrdy while
insinuating that I reject this entire body of scientific research. Lazare is providing a false narrative here
since I never said a word about Hrdy’s work.
[3] Richard Lewontin, Biological
Determinism, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Delivered at The
University of Utah, March 31 and April 1, 1982. https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/lewontin83.pdf
[4] The words are taken from Lazare’s article, Meeting
Judith Butler halfway.
[5] Chris Harman, Blood Simple, From International
Socialism 2 : 54, Spring 1992, pp. 169–75.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1992/xx/bloodsimple.html
[6] Baboon’s
revenge: Marxism versus feminism on the origins of humanity
Submitted
by World Revolution on 5 November, 2007 - 11:38, https://en.internationalism.org/wr/309/bookfair-report
[8] Review of Chris Knight's "Blood
Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture"
Submitted
by ICConline on 12 October, 2008 - 10:32, https://en.internationalism.org/2008/10/Chris-Knight
[9] Ian Tattersall, Look
Who’s Talking, New York Review of Books, December 19, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/19/look-whos-talking-the-language-puzzle-steven-mithen/
[10] Ian Tattersall, Masters
of the Planet: the search for our human origins, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.
P. 199-200.
[11] Tattersall, Look
Who’s Talking, op. cit.
[12] Jonathan Lear, On killing Freud (Again), in Open
Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, Harvard University Press, 1998,
p. 17.
[13] I am once more quoting Lazare.
[14] Quoted in Frank Brenner, Psychoanalysis
and the “empty place” of psychology within Marxism,
https://permanent-revolution.org/essays/marxism_psychoanalysis.pdf
[15] See Frank Brenner’s two part series, Intrepid
Thought: Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union,
https://permanent-revolution.org/essays/intrepid_thought_one.htm
https://permanent-revolution.org/essays/intrepid_thought_two.htm
[16] Jonathan Lear, On
killing Freud (Again), OPEN MINDED: Working Out the Logic of the Soul,
Harvard
University Press, 1998, p. 17.
[17] E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of
Knowkedge, Random House, 1998, p. 200.
[18] E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence,
Liveright, 2014, Chapter 14. Free Will.
[19] This quote from Lazare follows the pattern of
Wilson’s argument,
“…he
[Steiner] 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.”
The
only “historical materialist” I was criticizing was Lazare. Of course I never suggested
that biology can be “overlooked”, only that it does not determine our social
behavior.
[20] The quote is from Lazare’s article, Meeting
Judith Butler halfway.
[21] L. Trotsky, Dialectical
Materialism and Science, Speech to the Mendeleyev Society, 17 September
1925
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/09/science.htm
[22] An excellent systematic critique of contemporary anti-humanist
philosophies of both a right wing and left wing variety can be found in the
book, Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology, and Anti- Humanism, by
Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Anthem Press, 2022.
[23] Wilson, The
Meaning of Human Existence, op. cit. Chapter 15. Alone and Free in the
Universe.
