Gmail	kac attac <kacattac@gmail.com>
Pinker—Blank Slate
kac attac <kacattac@gmail.com>	Sat, Nov 11, 2023 at 9:17 AM
To: Stefan Kac <stefankac@yahoo.com>
of brain tissue dies, a part of the mind can disappear: a neurological patient
may lose the ability to name tools, recognize faces, anticipate the outcome of
his behavior, empathize with others, or keep in mind a region of space or of his
own body. (Descartes was thus wrong when he said that "the mind is entirely
indivisible" and concluded that it must be completely different from the
body.) Every emotion and thought gives off physical signals, and the new tech-
ologies for detecting them are so accurate that they can literally read a per-
son's mind and tell a cognitive neuroscientist whether the person is imagining
a face or a place. Neuroscientists can knock a gene out of a mouse (a gene also
found in humans) and prevent the mouse from learning, or insert extra copies
and make the mouse learn faster. Under the microscope, brain tissue shows a
staggering complexity--a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred
trillion synapses- that is commensurate with the staggering complexity of
human thought and experience. Neural network modelers have begun to
show how the building blocks of mental computation, such as storing and re-
trieving a pattern, can be implemented in neural circuitry. And when the brain
dies, the person goes out of existence. Despite concerted efforts by Alfred Rus-
sel Wallace and other Victorian scientists, it is apparently not possible to com-
municate with the dead.
Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language,
and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the
brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with
gauges and levers operated by a user- the self, the soul, the ghost, the person,
the
"me." But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just an-
other network of brain systems.
The first hint came from Phineas Gage, the nineteenth-century railroad
worker familiar to generations of psychology students. Gage was using a yard-
long spike to tamp explosive powder into a hole in a rock when a spark ignited
the powder and sent the spike into his cheekbone, through his brain, and out
the top of his skull. Phineas survived with his perception, memory, language,
and motor functions intact. But in the famous understatement of a co-worker,
"Gage was no longer Gage." A piece of iron had literally turned him into a dif-
ferent person, from courteous, responsible, and ambitious to rude, unreliable,
and shiftless. It did this by impaling his ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the re-
gion of the brain above the eyes now known to be involved in reasoning about
other people. Together with other areas of the prefrontal lobes and the limbic
system (the seat of the emotions), it anticipates the consequences of one's ac-
tons and selects behavior consonant with one's goals.30
Cognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have
shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost
is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the
brain to carry out."" Each of us feels that there is a single "I' in control. But that
42 / The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine


is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our
visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. (In fact, we are blind to detail
outside the fixation point. We quickly move our eyes to whatever looks inter-
esting, and that fools us into thinking that the detail was there all along.) The
brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cin-
gulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and
urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they
are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with
the soul or the self.
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified
self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who
showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum joining the cerebral
hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exer-
cise free will without the other one's advice or consent. Even more disconcert-
ingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the
behavior chosen without its knowledge by the right. For example, if an exper-
imenter flashes the command "WALK" to the right hemisphere (by keeping it
in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the per-
son will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when
the person (specifically, the person's left hemisphere) is asked why he just got
up, he will say, in all sincerity,
"To get a Coke"-rather than "I don't really
know" or "The urge just came over me"
" or "You've been testing me for years
since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don't
know exactly what you asked me to do.?" Similarly, if the patient's left hemi-
sphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and
both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they see (each
using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the
right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why
the whole person made those choices, it blithely says,
"Oh, that's simple. The
chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the
chicken shed.»32
The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-
generator in the patient's left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours
as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The
conscious mind- the self or soul--is a spin doctor, not the commander in
chief. Sigmund Freud immodestly wrote that "humanity has in the course of
time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its
naive self-love": the discovery that our world is not the center of the celestial
spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we were not
specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that
often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story
about our actions. He was right about the cumulative impact, but it was
The Last Wall to Fall | 43


most of the spoken vernacular by the age of three." That, too, may be an at-
tempt by the genome to get our culture-acquiring apparatus online as early in
life as the growing brain can handle it.
OUR MINDS, THEN, are fitted with mechanisms designed to read the goals of
other people so we can copy their intended acts. But why would we want to?
Though we take it for granted that acquiring culture is a good thing, the act of
acquiring it is often spoken of with scorn. The longshoreman and philosopher
Eric Hotfer wrote,
"When people are free to do as they please, they usually im-
itate each other.?" And we have a menagerie of metaphors that equate this quin-
essentially human ability with the behavior of animals: along with monkey
see, monkey do, we have aping, parroting, sheep, lemmings, copycats, and a herd
mentality.
Social psychologists have amply documented that people have a powerful
urge to do as their neighbors do. When unwitting subjects are surrounded by
confederates of the experimenter who have been paid to do something odd,
many or most will go along. They will defy their own eyes and call a long line
"short" or vice versa, nonchalantly fill out a questionnaire as smoke pours out
of a heating vent, or (in a Candid Camera sketch) suddenly strip down to their
underwear for no apparent reason.12 But the social psychologists point out
that human conformity, no matter how hilarious it looks in contrived experi-
ments, has a genuine rationale in social life-_indeed, two rationales. 13
The first is informational, the desire to benefit from other people's knowl-
edge and judgment. Weary veterans of committees say that the IQ of a group
is the lowest IQ of any member of the group divided by the number of people
in the group, but that is too pessimistic. In a species equipped with language,
an intuitive psychology, and a willingness to cooperate, a group can pool the
hard-won discoveries of members present and past and end up far smarter
than a race of hermits. Hunter-gatherers accumulate the know-how to make
tools, control fire, outsmart prey, and detoxify plants, and can live by this col-
lective ingenuity even if no member could re-create it all from scratch. Also, by
coordinating their behavior (say, in driving game or taking turns watching
children while others forage), they can act like a big multi-headed, multi-
limbed beast and accomplish feats that a die-hard individualist could not. And
an array of interconnected eyes, ears, and heads is more robust than a single set
with all its shortcomings and idiosyncrasies. There is a Yiddish expression of-
fered as a reality check to malcontents and conspiracy theorists: The whole
world isn't crazy.
Much of what we call culture is simply accumulated local wisdom: ways of
fashioning artifacts, selecting food, dividing up windfalls, and so on. Some an-
thropologists, like Marvin Harris, argue that even practices that seem as arbi-
trary as a lottery may in fact be solutions to ecological problems. ' Cows really
Culture Vultures | 63


should be sacred in India, he points out; they supply food (milk and butter),
fuel (dung), and power (by pulling plows), so the customs protecting them
thwart the temptation to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Other cultural
differences may have a rationale in reproduction.'S In some societies, men live
with their paternal families and support their wives and children; in others,
they live with their maternal families and support their sisters and nieces and
nephews. The second arrangement tends to be found in societies where men
have to spend long periods of time away from home and adultery is relatively
common, so they cannot be sure that their wives' children are theirs. Since the
children of a man's mother's daughter have to be his biological kin regardless
of who has been sleeping with whom, a matrilocal family allows men to invest
in children who are guaranteed to carry some of their genes.
Of course, only Procrustes could argue that all cultural practices have a di-
rect economic or genetic payoff. The second motive for conformity is norma-
tive, the desire to follow the norms of a community, whatever they are. But
this, too, is not as stupidly lemminglike as it first appears. Many cultural prac-
tices are arbitrary in their specific form but not in their reason for being. There
is no good reason for people to drive on the right side of the road as opposed
to the left side, or vice versa, but there is every reason for people to drive on the
same side. So an arbitrary choice of which side to drive on, and a widespread
conformity with that choice, make a great deal of sense. Other examples of ar-
bitrary but coordinated choices, which economists called "cooperative equi-
libria,;" include money, designated days of rest, and the pairings of sound and
meaning that make up the words in a language.
Shared arbitrary practices also help people cope with the fact that while
many things in life are arranged along a continuum, decisions must often be
binary.I Children do not become adults instantaneously, nor do dating cou-
ples become monogamous partners. Rites of passage and their modern equiv-
alent, pieces of paper like ID cards and marriage licenses, allow third parties to
decide how to treat ambiguous cases--as a child or as an adult, as committed
or as available--without endless haggling over differences of opinion.
And the fuzziest categories of all are other people's intentions. Is he a loyal
member of the coalition (one that I would want to have in my foxhole) or a
quisling who will bail out when times get tough? Does his heart lie with his fa-
ther's clan or with his father-in-law's? Is she a suspiciously merry widow or
just getting on with her life? Is he dissing me or just in a hurry? Initiation rites,
tribal badges, prescribed periods of mourning, and ritualized forms of address
may not answer these questions definitively, but they can remove clouds of
suspicion that would otherwise hang over people's heads.
When conventions are widely enough entrenched, they can become a kind
of reality even though they exist only in people's minds. In his book The Con-
struction of Social Reality (not to be confused with the social construction of
64 / The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine


homegrown technologies, and as a result they were no match for their plural-
istic conquerors. Even within Eurasia and (later) the Americas, cultures that
were isolated by mountainous geography-_for example, in the Appalachians,
the Balkans, and the Scottish highlands--remained backward for centuries in
comparison with the vast network of people around them.
The extreme case, Diamond points out, is Tasmania. The Tasmanians,
who were nearly exterminated by Europeans in the nineteenth century, were
the most technologically primitive people in recorded history. Unlike the Ab-
origines on the Australian mainland, the Tasmanians had no way of making
fire, no boomerangs or spear throwers, no specialized stone tools, no axes with
handles, no canoes, no sewing needles, and no ability to fish. Amazingly, the
archaeological record shows that their ancestors from the Australian mainland
had arrived with these technologies ten thousand years before. But then the
land bridge connecting Tasmania to the mainland was submerged and the is-
land was cut off from the rest of the world. Diamond speculates that any tech-
nology can be lost from a culture at some point in its history. Perhaps a raw
material came to be in short supply and people stopped making the products
that depended on it. Perhaps all the skilled artisans in a generation were killed
by a freak storm. Perhaps some prehistoric Luddite or ayatollah imposed a
taboo on the practice for one inane reason or another. Whenever this happens
in a culture that rubs up against other ones, the lost technology can eventually
be reacquired as the people clamor for the higher standard of living enjoyed by
their neighbors. But in lonely Tasmania, people would have had to reinvent the
proverbial wheel every time it was lost, and so their standard of living ratch-
eted downward.
The ultimate irony of the Standard Social Science Model is that it failed to
accomplish the very goal that brought it into being: explaining the different
fortunes of human societies without invoking race. The best explanation
today is thoroughly cultural, but it depends on seeing a culture as a product of
human desires rather than as a shaper of them.
HISTORY AND CULTURE, then, can be grounded in psychology, which can be
grounded in computation, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution. But this
kind of talk sets off alarms in the minds of many nonscientists. They fear that
consilience is a smokescreen for a hostile takeover of the humanities, arts, and
social sciences by philistines in white coats. The richness of their subject mat-
ter would be dumbed down into a generic palaver about neurons, genes, and
evolutionary urges. This scenario is often called "reductionism," and I will
conclude the chapter by showing why consilience does not call for it.
Reductionism, like cholesterol, comes in good and bad forms. Bad reduc
tionism-also called "greedy reductionism" or "destructive reductionism"
consists of trying to explain a phenomenon in terms of its smallest or simplest
Culture Vultures / 69


constituents. Greedy reductionism is not a straw man. I know several scientists
who believe (or at least say to granting agencies) that we will make break-
throughs in education, conflict resolution, and other social concerns by study-
ing the biophysics of neural membranes or the molecular structure of the
synapse. But greedy reductionism is far from the majority view, and it is easy
to show why it is wrong. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam has pointed out,
even the simple fact that a square peg won't fit into a round hole cannot be ex-
plained in terms of molecules and atoms but only at a higher level of analysis
involving rigidity (regardless of what makes the peg rigid) and geometry,26
And if anyone really thought that sociology or literature or history could be re-
placed by biology, why stop there? Biology could in turn be ground up into
chemistry, and chemistry into physics, leaving one struggling to explain the
causes of World War I in terms of electrons and quarks. Even if World War I
consisted of nothing but a very, very large number of quarks in a very, very
complicated pattern of motion, no insight is gained by describing it that way.
Good reductionism (also called hierarchical reductionism) consists not of
replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying
them. The building blocks used by one field are put under a microscope by an-
other. The black boxes get opened; the promissory notes get cashed. A geogra-
pher might explain why the coastline of Africa fits into the coastline of the
Americas by saying that the landmasses were once adjacent but sat on differ-
ent plates, which drifted apart. The question of why the plates move gets
passed on to the geologists, who appeal to an upwelling of magma that pushes
them apart. As for how the magma got so hot, they call in the physicists to ex-
plain the reactions in the Earth's core and mantle. None of the scientists is dis-
pensable. An isolated geographer would have to invoke magic to move the
continents, and an isolated physicist could not have predicted the shape of
South America.
So, too, for the bridge between biology and culture. The big thinkers in the
sciences of human nature have been adamant that mental life has to be under-
stood at several levels of analysis, not just the lowest one. The linguist Noam
Chomsky, the computational neuroscientist David Marr, and the ethologist
Niko Tinbergen have independently marked out a set of levels of analysis for
understanding a faculty of the mind. These levels include its function (what it
accomplishes in an ultimate, evolutionary sense); its real-time operation (how
it works proximately, from moment to moment); how it is implemented in
neural tissue; how it develops in the individual; and how it evolved in the
species.? For example, language is based on a combinatorial grammar de-
signed to communicate an unlimited number of thoughts. It is utilized by
people in real time via an interplay of memory lookup and rule application. It
is implemented in a network of regions in the center of the left cerebral hemi-
sphere that must coordinate memory, planning, word meaning, and grammar.
70 / The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine


study of culture. Sociobiology challenges the integrity of culture as a thing-in-
itself, as a distinctive and symbolic human creation."I0
Sahlins's book was called The Use and Abuse of Biology. An example of the
alleged abuse was the idea that Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness could
help explain the importance of family ties in human life. Hamilton had shown
how a tendency to make sacrifices for relatives could have evolved. Relatives
share genes, so any gene that nudges an organism to help a relative would be
indirectly helping a copy of itself. The gene will proliferate if the cost incurred
by the favor is less than the benefit conferred to the relative, discounted by the
degree of relatedness (one-half for a full sibling or offspring, one-eighth for a
first cousin, and so on). That can't be true, Sahlins wrote, because people in
most cultures don't have words for fractions. This leaves them unable to figure
out the coefficients of relatedness that would tell them which relatives to favor
and by how much. His objection is a textbook confusion of a proximate cause
with an ultimate cause. It is like saying that people can't possibly see in depth,
because most cultures haven't worked out the trigonometry that underlies
stereoscopic vision.
In any case,
"vulgar" wasn't the half of it. Following a favorable review in
the New York Review of Books by the distinguished biologist C. H. Waddington,
the "Sociobiology Study Group"
(including two of Wilson's colleagues, the pa-
leontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the geneticist Richard Lewontin) pub-
lished a widely circulated philippic called
"Against 'Sociobiology!" After
lumping Wilson with proponents of eugenics, Social Darwinism, and Jensen's
hypothesis of innate racial differences in intelligence, the signatories wrote:
The reason for the survival of these recurrent determinist theories is
that they consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status
quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race,
or sex.... These theories provided an important basis for the enact-
ment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the
United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies
which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.
... What Wilson's book illustrates to us is the enormous difficulty
in separating out not only the effects of environment (e.g., cultural
transmission) but also the personal and social class prejudices of the re-
searcher. Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose
work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerat-
ing them from responsibility for social problems."
They also accused Wilson of discussing "the salutary advantages of geno-
cide" and of making "institutions such as slavery ... seem natural in human
societies because of their universal' existence in the biological kingdom." In
Political Scientists / 109


Asymmetry. It is "an essential truth," he writes, that "good and kind people
outnumber all others by thousands to one."I2 Moreover,
"we perform 10,000
acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly
balancing, moment of cruelty,"'3 The statistics making up this "essential truth"
are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are defi-
nitely not "good and kind people," make up about three or four percent of the
male population, not several hundredths of a percent.'A But even if we accept
the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as "evil and de- Taleb',
structive," it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged
postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can bal-
plane
ance ten thousand kind ones that we call it "evil." Also, does it make sense to
crash
judge our entire species, as if we were standing en masse at the pearly gates?
The issue is not whether our species is "evil and destructive" but whether we
house evil and destructive motives, together with the beneficent and construc-
tive ones. If we do, one can try to understand what they are and how they
work.
Gould has objected to any attempt to understand the motives for war in
the context of human evolution, because
"each case of genocide can be
matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence; each murderous
band can be paired with a pacific clan."'IS Once again a ratio has been conjured
out of the blue; the data reviewed in Chapter 3 show that "pacific clans" either
do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the "murderous bands."16
But for Gould, such facts are beside the point, because he finds it necessary to
believe in the pacific clans on moral grounds. Only if humans lack any predis-
position for good or evil or anything else, he suggests, do we have grounds for
opposing genocide. Here is how he imagines the position of the evolutionary
psychologists he disagrees with:
Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity
cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source-_and as an ultimate
escape from full moral responsibility... . A group devoid of xenopho-
bia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others re-
plete with genes to encode a propensity for such categorization and
destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and
systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are pro-
grammed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once
promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive
than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged
(and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances may now spell our undoing
(or at least propagate our tragedies)-_-but we cannot be blamed for
these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the
night. I7
The Holy Trinity / 125


equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual con-
jecture about blank slates that might be refuted tomorrow. In this chapter we
will see how these values might be put on a more secure foundation.
WHAT KINDS OF differences are there to worry about? The chapters on gender
and children will review the current evidence on differences between sexes and
individuals, together with their implications and non-implications. The goal of
this part of the chapter is more general: to lay out the kinds of differences that
research could turn up over the long term, based on our understanding of
human evolution and genetics, and to lay out the moral issues they raise.
This book is primarily about human nature-_-an endowment of cognitive
and emotional faculties that is universal to healthy members of Homo sapiens.
Samuel Johnson wrote, "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived
by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by
desire, and seduced by pleasure." The abundant evidence that we share a
human nature does not mean that the differences among individuals, races, or
sexes are also in our nature. Confucius could have been right when he wrote,
"Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart."?
Modern biology tells us that the forces that make people alike are not the
same as the forces that make people different.° (Indeed, they tend to be stud-
ed by different scientists: the similarities by evolutionary psychologists, the
differences by behavioral geneticists.) Natural selection works to homogenize
a species into a standard overall design by concentrating the effective genes-
the ones that build well-functioning organs-_and winnowing out the ineffec-
tive ones. When it comes to an explanation of what makes us tick, we are thus
birds of a feather. Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver,
a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs. This is most obvi-
ous in the case of language, where every neurologically intact child is equipped
to acquire any human language, but it is true of other parts of the mind as well.
Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological
unity of humankind than on any differences.
4
We are all pretty much alike, but we are not, of course, clones. Except in
the case of identical twins, each person is genetically unique. That is because
random mutations infiltrate the genome and take time to be eliminated, and
they are shuffled together in new combinations when individuals sexually re-
produce. Natural selection tends to preserve some degree of genetic hetero-
geneity at the microscopic level in the form of small, random variations
among proteins. That variation twiddles the combinations of an organism's
molecular locks and keeps its descendants one step ahead of the microscopic
germs that are constantly evolving to crack those locks.
All species harbor genetic variability, but Homo sapiens is among the less
variable ones. Geneticists call us a "small" species, which sounds like a bad joke
142 / Human Nature with a Human Face


given that we have infested the planet like roaches. What they mean is that the
amount of genetic variation found among humans is what a biologist would,
expect in a species with a small number of members. There are more genetic
differences among chimpanzees, for instance, than there are among humans,
even though we dwarf them in number. The reason is that our ancestors
passed through a population bottleneck fairly recently in our evolutionary
history (less than a hundred thousand years ago) and dwindled to a small
number of individuals with a correspondingly small amount of genetic varia-
tion. The species survived and rebounded, and then underwent a population
explosion after the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago.
That explosion bred many copies of the genes that were around when we were
sparse in number; there has not been much time to accumulate many new ver-
sions of the genes.
At various points after the bottleneck, differences between races emerged.
But the differences in skin and hair that are so obvious when we look at peo-
ple of other races are really a trick played on our intuitions. Racial differences
are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the trop-
is, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the
elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them
into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do.' Working
in opposition to the adaptation to local climates, which makes groups differ-
ent on the skin, is an evolutionary force that makes neighboring groups simi-
lar inside. Rare genes can offer immunity to endemic diseases, so they get
sucked into one group from a neighboring group like ink on a blotter, even if
members of one group mate with members of the other infrequently.? That is
why Jews, for example, tend to be genetically similar to their non-Jewish
neighbors all over the world, even though until recently they tended to marry
other Jews. As little as one conversion, affair, or rape involving a gentile in
every generation can be enough to blur genetic boundaries over time.
Taking all these processes into account, we get the following picture. Peo-
ple are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative
differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater ex-
tent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between
ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that
holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic
group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions
about our biology.
But biology does not let us off the hook entirely. Individuals are not ge-
netically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of
the body except the brain. And though genetic differences between races and
ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not
nonexistent (as we see in their ability to give rise to physical differences and to
The Fear of Inequality / 143


Y
sh
intellect, moral development or social capacity, but only in respect to "certain
inalienable rights." 12
Some of the most influential contemporary thinkers about biology and
human nature have drawn the same distinction. Ernst Mayr, one of the found.
ers of the modern theory of evolution, wisely anticipated nearly four decades
of debate when he wrote in 1963:
dero
2/b
Equality in spite of evident nonidentity is a somewhat sophisticated
concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to
be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality
with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the
organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by
genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to "condition-
ing" or other nongenetic factors. Such authors conveniently ignore the
results of twin studies and of the genetic analysis of nonmorphological
traits in animals. An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises
can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based
on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not
exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. 13
Noam Chomsky made the same point in an article entitled "Psychology and
Ideology." Though he disagreed with Herrnstein's argument about IQ (dis-
cussed in Chapter 6), he denied the popular charge that Herrnstein was a racist
and distanced himself from fellow radical scientists who were denouncing the
facts as dangerous:
A correlation between race and IQ (were this shown to exist) entails no
social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is
assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his
own right, but as a representative of this category. Herrnstein mentions
a possible correlation between height and IQ. Of what social impor-
tance is that? None of course, since our society does not suffer under
discrimination by height. We do not insist on assigning each adult to the
category "below six feet in height" or "above six feet in height" when we
ask what sort of education he should receive or where he should live or
what work he should do. Rather, he is what he is, quite independent of
the mean IQ of people of his height category. In a nonracist society, the
category of race would be of no greater significance. The mean IQ of in-
dividuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of
a particular individual who is what he is..
It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators
should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely s0.
146 / Human Nature with a Human Face


Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical
talent or rank in running the one-hundred-yard dash is in part geneti-
cally determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or an-
other about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever
they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state
of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society?14
Some readers may not be reassured by this lofty stance. If all ethnic groups
and both sexes were identical in all talents, then discrimination would simply
be self-defeating, and people would abandon it as soon as the facts were
known. But if they are not identical, it would be rational to take those differ-
ences into account. After all, according to Bayes' theorem a decision maker
who needs to make a prediction (such as whether a person will succeed in a
profession) should factor in the prior probability, such as the base rate of suc-
cess for people in that group. If races or sexes are different on average, racial
profiling or gender stereotyping would be actuarially sound, and it would be
naive to expect information about race and sex not to be used for prejudicial
ends. So a policy to treat people as individuals seems like a thin reed on which
to hang any hope of reducing discrimination.
An immediate reply to this worry is that the danger arises whether the dif-
ferences between groups are genetic or environmental in origin. An average is
an average, and an actuarial decision maker should care only about what it is,
not what caused it.
Moreover, the fact that discrimination can be economically rational would
be truly dangerous only if our policies favored ruthless economic optimization
regardless of all other costs. But in fact we have many policies that allow moral
principles to trump economic efficiency. For example, it is illegal to sell your
vote, sell your organs, or sell your children, even though an economist could
argue that any voluntary exchange leaves both parties better off. These deci-
sions come naturally in modern democracies, and we can just as resolutely
choose public policies and private mores that disallow race and gender preju-
dice.I5
Moral and legal proscriptions are not the only way to reduce discrimina-
tion in the face of possible group differences. The more information we have
about the qualifications of an individual, the less impact a race-wide or sex-
wide average would have in any statistical decision concerning that person.
The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive
testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive infor-
mation about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or
gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future.)
Discrimination-in the sense of using a statistically predictive trait of
an individual's group to make a decision about the individual- is not always
The Fear of Inequality / 147


immoral, or at least we don't always treat it as immoral. To predict someone's
behavior perfectly we would need an X-ray machine for the soul. Even pre-
dicting someone's behavior with the tools we do have such as tests, inter.
views, background checks, and recommendations-_Would require unlimited
resources if we were to use them to the fullest. Decisions that have to be made
with finite time and resources, and which have high costs for certain kinds of
errors, must use some trait as a basis for judging a person. And that necessarily
judges the person according to a stereotype.
In some cases the overlap between two groups is so small that we feel com-
fortable discriminating against one of the groups absolutely. For example, no
one objects to keeping chimpanzees out of our schools, even though it is con-
ceivable that if we tested every chimp on the planet we might find one that
could learn to read and write. We apply a speciesist stereotype that chimps
cannot profit from a human education, figuring that the odds of finding an ex-
ception do not outweigh the costs of examining every last one.
In more realistic circumstances we have to decide on a case-by-case basis
whether the discrimination is justifiable. Denying driving and voting rights to
young teenagers is a form of age discrimination that is unfair to responsible
teens. But we are not willing to pay either the financial costs of developing a test
for psychological maturity or the moral costs of classification errors, such as
teens wrapping their cars around trees. Almost everyone is appalled by racial
profiling pulling over motorists for "driving while black" But after the 2001
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, about half of
Americans polled said they were not opposed to ethnic profiling-_scrutinizing
passengers for "flying while Arab." 6 People who distinguish the two must rea-
son that the benefits of catching a marijuana dealer do not outweigh the harm
done to innocent black drivers, but the benefits of stopping a suicide hijacker
do outweigh the harm done to innocent Arab passengers. Cost-benefit analy-
ses are also sometimes used to justify racial preferences: the benefits of racially
diverse workplaces and campuses are thought to outweigh the costs of dis-
criminating against whites.
The possibility that men and women are not the same in all respects also
presents policymakers with choices. It would be reprehensible for a bank to
hire a man over a woman as a manager for the reason that he is less likely to
quit after having a child. Would it also be reprehensible for a couple to hire a
Woman over a man as a nanny for their daughter because she is less likely to
sexually abuse the child? Most people believe that the punishment for a given
crime should be the same regardless of who commits it. But knowing the typ-
ical sexual emotions of the two sexes, should we apply the same punishment to
a man who seduces a sixteen-year-old girl and to a woman who seduces à
sixteen-year-old boy?
These are some of the issues that face the people of a democracy in decid-
148 / Human Nature with a Human Face


considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in
their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the
concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will
quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an
IQ of 64, removing lead paint that lowers a child's IQ by five points, or the
presidential qualifications of George W. Bush. In any case, there is now ample
evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be
linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in
the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glu-
cose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of
the variation in life outcomes such as income and social status,20
The existence of inborn talents, however, does not call for Social Darwin-
ism. The anxiety that one must lead to the other is based on two fallacies. The
first is an all-or-none mentality that often infects discussions of the social im-
plications of genetics. The likelihood that inborn differences are one contribu-
tor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor. The other ones
include sheer luck, inherited wealth, race and class prejudice, unequal oppor-
tunity (such as in schooling and connections), and cultural capital: habits and
values that promote economic success. Acknowledging that talent matters
doesn't mean that prejudice and unequal opportunity do not matter.
But more important, even if inherited talents can lead to socioeconomic
success, it doesn't mean that the success is deserved in a moral sense. Social
Darwinism is based on Spencer's assumption that we can look to evolution to
discover what is right--that "good" can be boiled down to
"evolutionarily suc-
cessful.?" This lives in infamy as a reference case for the "naturalistic fallacy":
the belief that what happens in nature is good. (Spencer also confused people's
social success--their wealth, power, and status--with their evolutionary suc-
cess, the number of their viable descendants.) The naturalistic fallacy was
named by the moral philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 Principia Ethica, the
book that killed Spencer's ethics.?' Moore applied "Hume's Guillotine," the ar-
gument that no matter how convincingly you show that something is true, it
never follows logically that it ought to be true. Moore noted that it is sensible
to ask, "This conduct is more evolutionarily successful, but is it good?" The
mere fact that the question makes sense shows that evolutionary success and
goodness are not the same thing.
Can one really reconcile biological differences with a concept of social jus-
tice? Absolutely. In his famous theory of justice, the philosopher John Rawls
asks us to imagine a social contract drawn up by self-interested agents negoti-
ating under a veil of ignorance, unaware of the talents or status they will in-
herit at birth- ghosts ignorant of the machines they will haunt. He argues that
a just society is one that these disembodied souls would agree to be born into,
knowing that they might be dealt a lousy social or genetic hand.?? If you agree
150 / Human Nature with a Human Face


that this is a reasonable conception of justice, and that the agents would insist
on a broad social safety net and redistributive taxation (short of eliminating
incentives that make everyone better off), then you can justify compensatory
social policies even if you think differences in social status are 100 percent ge-
metic. The policies would be, quite literally, a matter of justice, not a conse-
quence of the indistinguishability of individuals.
Indeed, the existence of innate differences in ability makes Rawls's con-
ception of social justice especially acute and eternally relevant. If we were
blank slates, and if a society ever did eliminate discrimination, the poorest
could be said to deserve their station because they must have chosen to do less
with their standard-issue talents. But if people differ in talents, people might
find themselves in poverty in a nonprejudiced society even if they applied
themselves to the fullest. That is an injustice that, a Rawlsian would argue,
ought to be rectified, and it would be overlooked if we didn't recognize that
people differ in their abilities.
SOME PEOPLE HAVE suggested to me that these grandiloquent arguments are
just too fancy for the dangerous world we live in. Granted, there is evidence
that people are different, but since data in the social sciences are never perfect,
and since a conclusion of inequality might be used to the worst ends by bigots
or Social Darwinists, shouldn't we err on the side of caution and stick with the
null hypothesis that people are identical? Some believe that even if we were
certain that people differ genetically, we might still want to promulgate the fic-
tion that they are the same, because it is less open to abuse.
This argument is based on the fallacy that the Blank Slate has nothing but
good moral implications and a theory of human nature nothing but bad
ones. In the case of human differences, as in the case of human universals, the
dangers go both ways. If people in different stations are mistakenly thought
to differ in their inherent ability, we might overlook discrimination and un-
equal opportunity. In Darwin's words, "If the misery of the poor be caused
not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." But if peo-
ple in different stations are mistakenly thought to be the same, then we might
envy them the rewards they've earned fair and square and might implement
coercive policies to hammer down the nails that stick up. The economist
Friedrich Hayek wrote, "It is just not true that humans are born equal;.. if
We treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual posi-
ton;... [thus] the only way to place them in an equal position would be
to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are,
therefore, not only different but in conflict with each other,"3 The phi-
losophers Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Robert Nozick have made similar
points.
Unequal treatment in the name of equality can take many forms. Some
The Fear of Inequality / 151


Forms have both defenders and detractors, such as soak-the-rich taxation, heavy
estate taxes, streaming by age rather than ability in schools, quotas and pref
erences that favor certain races or regions, and prohibitions against private
medical care or other voluntary transactions. But some can be downright dan-
gerous. If people are assumed to start out identical but some end up wealthier
than others, observers may conclude that the wealthier ones must be more ra-
pacious. And as the diagnosis slides from talent to sin, the remedy can shift from
redistribution to vengeance. Many atrocities of the twentieth century were com-
mitted in the name of egalitarianism, targeting people whose success was taken
as evidence of their criminality. The kulaks ("bourgeois peasants") were exter-
minated by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union; teachers, former landlords,
and "rich peasants" were humiliated, tortured, and murdered during China's
Cultural Revolution; city dwellers and literate professionals were worked to
death or executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.? Edu-
cated and entrepreneurial minorities who have prospered in their adopted re-
gions, such as the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the
Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Jews al-
most everywhere, have been expelled from their homes or killed in pogroms be-
cause their visibly successful members were seen as parasites and exploiters, 25
A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material
equality is inherent to all political systems. The major political philosophies
can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right
places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom.
The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right
sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree
about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend there is no tradeoff. And
that in turn means that any discovery of innate differences among individuals
is not forbidden knowledge to be suppressed but information that might help
us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner.
THE SPECTER OF eugenics can be disposed of as easily as the specters of dis-
crimination and Social Darwinism. Once again, the key is to distinguish bio-
logical facts from human values.
If people differ genetically in intelligence and character, could we selec-
tively breed for smarter and nicer people? Possibly, though the intricacies of
genetics and development would make it far harder than the fans of eugenics
imagined. Selective breeding is straightforward for genes with additive ef
tects that is, genes that have the same impact regardless of the other genes in
the genome. But some traits, such as scientific genius, athletic virtuosity, and
musical giftedness, are what behavioral geneticists call emergenic: they mate,
rialize only with certain combinations of genes and therefore don't "breed
true.?"2 Moreover, a given gene can lead to different behavior in different en-
152 / Human Nature with a Human Face


explanation; if behavior were utterly random, we couldn't hold the person re-
sponsible in any case. So if we ever hold people responsible for their behavior,
it will have to be in spite of any causal explanation we feel is warranted,
whether it invokes genes, brains, evolution, media images, self-doubt, bringing
up-ke, or being raised by bickering women. The difference between explaining
behavior and excusing it is captured in the saying "To understand is not to for.
give," and has been stressed in different ways by many philosophers, including
Hume, Kant, and Sartre. 13 Most philosophers believe that unless a person was
literally coerced (that is, someone held a gun to his head), we should consider
his actions to have been freely chosen, even if they were caused by events inside
his skull.
But how can we have both explanation, with its requirement of lawful cau-
sation, and responsibility, with its requirement of free choice? To have them
both we don't need to resolve the ancient and perhaps unresolvable antinomy
between free will and determinism. We only have to think clearly about what
We want the notion of responsibility to achieve. Whatever may be its inherent
abstract worth, responsibility has an eminently practical function: deterring
harmful behavior. When we say that we hold someone responsible for a
wrongful act, we expect him to punish himself--by compensating the victim,
acquiescing to humiliation, incurring penalties, or expressing credible re-
morse-and we reserve the right to punish him ourselves. Unless a person is
willing to suffer some unpleasant (and hence deterring) consequence, claims
of responsibility are hollow. Richard Nixon was ridiculed when he bowed to
pressure and finally "took responsibility" for the Watergate burglary but did
not accept any costs such as apologizing, resigning, or firing his aides.
One reason to hold someone responsible is to deter the person from com-
mitting similar acts in the future. But that cannot be the whole story, because
it is different only in degree from the contingencies of punishment used by be-
haviorists to modify the behavior of animals. In a social, language-using, rea-
soning organism, the policy can also deter similar acts by other organisms who
learn of the contingencies and control their behavior so as not to incur the
penalties. That is the ultimate reason we feel compelled to punish elderly Nazi
war criminals, even though there is little danger that they would perpetrate
another holocaust if we let them die in their beds in Bolivia. By holding them
responsible- that is, by publicly enforcing a policy of rooting out and punish-
ing evil wherever and whenever it occurs- we hope to deter others from com-
mitting comparable evils in the future.
This is not to say that the concept of responsibility is a recommendation
by policy wonks for preventing the largest number of harmful acts at the least
cost. Even if experts had determined that punishing a Nazi would prevent no
future atrocities, or that we could save more lives by diverting the manpower
to catching drunk drivers, we would still want to bring Nazis to justice. The de-
180 / Human Nature with a Human Face


responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfac-
tion; and that, to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must
be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party
accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the
mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or,
if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
This is an excellent characterization of a person who cannot be deterred. If
someone is too addled to know that an act would harm someone, he cannot be
inhibited by the injunction "Don't harm people, or else!" The MNaughten
rule aims to forgo spiteful punishment--retribution that harms the perpetra-
tor with no hope of deterring him or people similar to him.
The insanity defense achieved its present notoriety, with dueling rent-a-
shrinks and ingenious abuse excuses, when it was expanded from a practical
test of whether the cognitive system responding to deterrence is working to the
more nebulous tests of what can be said to have produced the behavior. In
the 1954 Durham decision, Bazelon invoked "the science of psychiatry" and
"the science of psychology" to create a new basis for the insanity defense:
The rule we now hold is simply that an accused is not criminally re-
sponsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or men-
tal defect.
Unless one believes that ordinary acts are chosen by a ghost in the machine, all
acts are products of cognitive and emotional systems in the brain. Criminal
acts are relatively rare-_-if everyone in a defendant's shoes acted as he did, the
law against what he did would be repealed- so heinous acts will often be
products of a brain system that is in some way different from the norm, and the
behavior can be construed as "a product of mental disease or mental defect."
The Durham decision and similar insanity rules, by distinguishing behavior
that is a product of a brain condition from behavior that is something else,
threatens to turn every advance in our understanding of the mind into an ero-
son of responsibility.
Now, some discoveries about the mind and brain really could have an im-
pact on our attitudes toward responsibility--but they may call for expanding
the domain of responsibility, not contracting it. Suppose desires that some
times culminate in the harassment and battering of women are present in
many men. Does that really mean that men should be punished more leniently
for such crimes, because they can't help it? Or does it mean they should be
punished more surely and severely, because that is the best way to counteract
a strong or widespread urge? Suppose a vicious psychopath is found to have a
defective sense of sympathy, which makes it harder for him to appreciate the
184 / Human Nature with a Human Face


suffering of his victims. Should we mitigate the punishment because he has di-
minished capacity? Or should we make the punishment more sure and severe
to teach him a lesson in the only language he understands?
Why do people's intuitions go in opposite directions-_-both "If he has
trouble controlling himself, he should be punished more leniently" and "If he
has trouble controlling himself, he should be punished more severely? It goes
back to the deterrence paradox. Suppose some people need a threat of one lash
with a wet noodle to deter them from parking in front of a fire hydrant. Sup-
pose people with a bad gene, a bad brain, or a bad childhood need the threat
of ten lashes. A policy that punishes illegal parkers with nine lashes will cause
unnecessary suffering and not solve the problem: nine lashes is more than nec-
essary to deter ordinary people and less than necessary to deter defective peo-
ple. Only a penalty of ten lashes can reduce both illegal parking and lashing:
everyone will be deterred, no one will block hydrants, and no one will get
whipped. So, paradoxically, the two extreme policies (harsh punishment and
no punishment) are defensible and the intermediate ones are not. Of course,
people's deterrence thresholds in real life aren't pinned at just two values but
are broadly distributed (one lash for some people, two for others, and so on),
so many intermediate levels of punishment will be defensible, depending on
how one weights the benefits of deterring wrongdoing against the costs of in
flicting harm.
Even for those who are completely undeterrable, because of frontal-lobe
damage, genes for psychopathy, or any other putative cause, we do not have to
allow lawyers to loose them on the rest of us. We already have a mechanism for
those likely to harm themselves or others but who do not respond to the carrots
and sticks of the criminal justice system: involuntary civil commitment, in
which we trade off some guarantees of civil liberties against the security of
being protected from likely predators. In all these decisions, the sciences of
human nature can help estimate the distribution of deterrabilities, but they can-
not weight the conflicting values of avoiding the greatest amount of unneces-
Sary punishment and preventing the greatest amount of future wrongdoing.'
I do not claim to have solved the problem of free will, only to have shown
that we don't need to solve it to preserve personal responsibility in the face of
an increasing understanding of the causes of behavior. Nor do I argue that
deterrence is the only way to encourage virtue, just that we should recognize
it as the active ingredient that makes responsibility worth keeping. Most of
all, I hope I have dispelled two fallacies that have allowed the sciences of
human nature to sow unnecessary fear. The first fallacy is that biological ex-
planations corrode responsibility in a way that environmental explanations
do not. The second fallacy is that causal explanations (both biological and en-
vironmental) corrode responsibility in a way that a belief in an uncaused will
or soul does not.
The Fear of Determinism / 185


The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are primary in
people's minds. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by
the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name, at least not
for long. Names for minorities will continue to change as long as people have
negative attitudes toward them. We will know that we have achieved mutual
respect when the names stay put.
"IMAGE IS NOTHING. Thirst is everything,"' screams a soft-drink ad that tries
to create a new image for its product by making fun of soft-drink ads that try
to create images for their products. Like words, images are salient tokens of
our mental lives. And like words, images are said to have an insidious power
over our consciousness, presumably because they are inscribed directly onto a
blank slate. In postmodernist and relativist thinking, images are held to shape
our view of reality, or to be our view of reality, or to be reality itself. This is es-
pecially true of images representing celebrities, politicians, women, and
AHANAs. And as with language, the scientific study of imagery shows that the
fear is misplaced.
A good description of the standard view of images within cultural studies
and related disciplines may be found in the Concise Glossary of Cultural The-
ory. It defines image as a
"mental or visual representation of an object or event
as depicted in the mind, a painting, a photograph, or film." Having thus run
together images in the world (such as paintings) with images in the mind, the
entry lays out the centrality of images in postmodernism, cultural studies, and
academic feminism.
First it notes, reasonably enough, that images can misrepresent reality and
thereby serve the interests of an ideology. A racist caricature, presumably, is a
prime example. But then it takes the concept further:
With what is called the "crisis of representation" brought about by
postmodernism, however, it is often questioned whether an image can
be thought to simply represent, or misrepresent, a supposedly prior or
external, image-free reality. Reality is seen rather as always subject to, or
as the product of, modes of representation. In this view we inescapably
inhabit a world of images or representations and not a "real world" and
true or false images of it.
In other words, if a tree falls in a forest and there is no artist to paint it, not only
did the tree make no sound, but it did not fall, and there was no tree there to
begin with.
In a further move. we are thought to exist in a world of HYPERREAL-
Ty, in which images are self-generating and entirely detached from any
In Touch with Reality / 213


this way of thinking comes easily to Americans as well. © It appears to be the
core of our intuitive economics.
Fiske contrasts Equality Matching with a very different system called Mar.
ket Pricing, the system of rents, prices, wages, and interest rates that underlies
modern economies. Market Pricing relies on the mathematics of multiplica-
tion, division, fractions, and large numbers, together with the social institu-
tions of money, credit, written contracts, and complex divisions of labor.
Market Pricing is absent in hunter-gatherer societies, and we know it played
no role in our evolutionary history because it relies on technologies like writ-
ing, money, and formal mathematics, which appeared only recently. Even
today the exchanges carried out by Market Pricing may involve causal chains
that are impossible for any individual to grasp in full. I press some keys to
enter characters into this manuscript today and entitle myself to receive some
groceries years from now, not because I will barter a copy of The Blank Slate to
a banana grower but because of a tangled web of third and fourth and fifth
parties (publishers, booksellers, truckers, commodity brokers) that I depend
on without fully understanding what they do.
When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of in-
teracting applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank in-
comprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think about a
dinner guest offering to pay the host for her meal, a person barking an order to
a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss's plate. Mis-
understandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equal-
ity Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more
pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psy-
chologies, one of them intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned,
and clashes between them have been common in economic history.
Economists refer to "the physical fallacy": the belief that an object has a
true and constant value, as opposed to being worth only what someone is will-
ing to pay for it at a given place and time.47 This is simply the difference be-
tween the Equality Matching and Market Pricing mentalities. The physical
fallacy may not arise when three chickens are exchanged for one knite, but
when the exchanges are mediated by money, credit, and third parties, the fal-
lacy can have ugly consequences. The belief that goods have a "just price' im-
plies that it is avaricious to charge anything higher, and the result has been
mandatory pricing schemes in medieval times, communist regimes, and many
Third World countries. Such attempts to work around the law of supply and
demand have usually led to waste, shortages, and black markets. Another con-
sequence ot the physical fallacy is the widespread practice of outlawing inter-
est, which comes from the intuition that it is rapacious to demand additional
money trom someone who has paid back exactly what he borrowed. Of
course, the only reason people borrow at one time and repay it later is that the
234 / Know Thyself


money is worth more to them at the time they borrow it than it will be at the
time they repay it. So when regimes enact sweeping usury laws, people who
could put money to productive use cannot get it, and everyone's standards of
living go down.48
Just as the value of something may change with time, which creates a niche
for lenders who move valuable things around in time, so it may change with
space, which creates a niche for middlemen who move valuable things around
in space. A banana is worth more to me in a store down the street than it is in
a warehouse a hundred miles away, so I am willing to pay more to the grocer
than I would to the importer- even though by "eliminating the middleman" I
could pay less per banana. For similar reasons, the importer is willing to charge
the grocer less than he would charge me.
But because lenders and middlemen do not cause tangible objects to come
into being, their contributions are difficult to grasp, and they are often
thought of as skimmers and parasites. A recurring event in human history is
the outbreak of ghettoization, confiscation, expulsion, and mob violence
against middlemen, often ethnic minorities who learned to specialize in the
middleman niche." The Jews in Europe are the most familiar example, but the
expatriate Chinese, the Lebanese, the Armenians, and the Gujeratis and Chett-
yars of India have suffered similar histories of persecution.
One economist in an unusual situation showed how the physical fallacy
does not depend on any unique historical circumstance but easily arises from
human psychology. He watched the entire syndrome emerge before his eyes
when he spent time in a World War Il prisoner-of-war camp. Every month the
prisoners received identical packages from the Red Cross. A few prisoners cir-
culated through the camp, trading and lending chocolates, cigarettes, and other
commodities among prisoners who valued some items more than others or
who had used up their own rations before the end of the month. The middle-
men made a small profit from each transaction, and as a result they were deeply
resented- a microcosm of the tragedy of the middleman minority. The econ-
omist wrote: "The middleman's] function, and his hard work in bringing
buyer and seller together, were ignored; profits were not regarded as a reward
for labour, but as the result of sharp practises. Despite the fact that his very ex-
istence was proof to the contrary, the middleman was held to be redundant."3
The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a
high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy:
to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasp-
ing the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born
with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter, for example, would
give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and sta-
tistics in any high school or college curriculum. Unfortunately, most curricula
have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable, because
Out of Our Depths / 235


newborn to maturity cut their losses and abandoned it to die.20 The fat cheeks
and precocious responsiveness in a baby's face may be an advertisement of
health designed to tilt the decision in its favor.?l
But the most interesting conflicts are the psychological ones, played out in
family dramas. Trivers touted the liberatory nature of sociobiology by invok-
ing an "underlying symmetry in our social relationships" and "submerged ac-
tors in the social world."2 He was referring to women, as we will see in the
chapter on gender, and to children. The theory of parent-offspring conflict
says that families do not contain all-powerful, all-knowing parents and their
passive, grateful children. Natural selection should have equipped children
with psychological tactics allowing them to hold their own in a struggle with
their parents, with neither party having a permanent upper hand. Parents have
a short-lived advantage in sheer brawn, but children can fight back by being
cute, whining, throwing tantrums, pulling guilt trips, tormenting their sib-
lings, getting between their parents, and holding themselves hostage with the
threat of self-destructive behavior.?3 As they say, insanity is hereditary: you get
it from your children.
Most profoundly, children do not allow their personalities to be shaped by
their parents' nagging, blandishments, or attempts to serve as role models,?+ As
we shall see in the chapter on children, the effect of being raised by a given pair
of parents within a culture is surprisingly small: children who grow up in the
same home end up no more alike in personality than children who were sepa-
rated at birth; adopted siblings grow up to be no more similar than strangers.
The findings flatly contradict the predictions of every theory in the history of
psychology but one. Trivers alone had predicted:
The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One
expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental ma-
nipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes
an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order
to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection
Will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.?5
That children don't turn out the way their parents want is, for many people,
one of the bittersweet lessons of parenthood. "Your children are not your chil-
dren," wrote the poet Kahlil Gibran. "You may give them your love but not
your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts,"6
The most obvious prediction of the theory of parent-offspring conflict is
that parents and siblings should all have different perceptions of how the par-
ents treated the siblings. Indeed, studies of the grown members of families
show that most parents claim they treated their children equitably, while a
The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 249


WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE who are not tied by blood or children? No one doubts
that human beings make sacrifices for people who are unrelated to them. But
they could do so in two different ways.
Humans, like ants, could have a gung-ho superorganism thing that
prompts them to do everything for the colony. The idea that people are in-
stinctively communal is an important precept of the romantic doctrine of the
Noble Savage. It figured in the theory of Engels and Marx that "primitive com-
munism" was the first social system, in the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin (who
wrote,
"The ants and termites have renounced the 'Hobbesian war; and they
are the better for it"), in the family-of-man utopianism of the 1960s, and in the
writings of contemporary radical scientists such as Lewontin and Chomsky.41
Some radical scientists imagine that the only alternative is an Ayn Randian in-
dividualism in which every man is an island. Steven Rose and the sociologist
Hilary Rose, for instance, call evolutionary psychology a
"right-wing libertar-
an attack on collectivity."12 But the accusation is factually incorrect- as we
shall see in the chapter on politics, many evolutionary psychologists are on the
political left--and it is conceptually incorrect. The real alternative to romantic
collectivism is not "right-wing libertarianism" but a recognition that social
generosity comes from a complex suite of thoughts and emotions rooted in
the logic of reciprocity. That gives it a very different psychology from the com-
munal sharing practiced by social insects, human families, and cults that try to
pretend they are families.13
Trivers built on arguments by Williams and Hamilton that pure, public-
minded altruism--a desire to benefit the group or species at the expense of the
self is unlikely to evolve among nonrelatives, because it is vulnerable to inva-
sion by cheaters who prosper by enjoying the good deeds of others without
contributing in turn. But as I mentioned, Trivers also showed that a measured
reciprocal altruism can evolve. Reciprocators who help others who have helped
them, and who shun or punish others who have failed to help them, will enjoy
the benefits of gains in trade and outcompete individualists, cheaters, and pure
altruists.* Humans are well equipped for the demands of reciprocal altruism.
They remember each other as individuals (perhaps with the help of dedicated
regions of the brain), and have an eagle eye and a flypaper memory for
cheaters.4S They feel moralistic emotions_-liking, sympathy, gratitude, guilt,
shame, and anger- that are uncanny implementations of the strategies for re-
ciprocal altruism in computer simulations and mathematical models. Experi-
ments have confirmed the prediction that people are most inclined to help a
stranger when they can do so at low cost, when the stranger is in need, and
When the stranger is in a position to reciprocate.* They like people who grant
them favors, grant favors to those they like, feel guilty when they have withheld
a possible favor, and punish those who withhold favors from them.47
The Many Roots of Our Suffering / 255


a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives uncon-
scious so as not to betray- by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the
deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural se-
lection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate im-
ages of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.76
The conventional view may be largely correct when it comes to the physical
world, which allows for reality checks by multiple observers and where mis-
conceptions are likely to harm the perceiver. But as Trivers notes, it may not be
correct when it comes to the self, which one can access in a way that others
cannot and where misconceptions may be helpful. Sometimes parents may
want to convince a child that what they are doing is for the child's own good,
children may want to convince parents that they are needy rather than greedy,
lovers may want to convince each other that they will always be true, and un-
related folks may want to convince one another that they are worthy coopera-
tors. These opinions are often embellishments, if not tall tales, and to slip them
beneath a partner's radar a speaker should believe in them so as not to stam-
mer, sweat, or trip himself up in contradictions. Ice-veined liars might, of
course, get away with telling bald fibs to strangers, but they would also have
trouble keeping friends, who could never take their promises seriously. The
price of looking credible is being unable to lie with a straight face, and that
means a part of the mind must be designed to believe its own propaganda-
while another part registers just enough truth to keep the self-concept in touch
with reality.
The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving
Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which dis-
puted the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the
one true self. No, said Goffman; it's masks all the way down. Many discoveries
in the ensuing decades have borne him out."
Though modern psychologists and psychiatrists tend to reject orthodox
Freudian theory, many acknowledge that Freud was right about the defense
mechanisms of the ego. Any therapist will tell you that people protest too
much, deny or repress unpleasant facts, project their flaws onto others, turn
their discomfort into abstract intellectual problems, distract themselves with
time-consuming activities, and rationalize away their motives. The psychia-
trists Randolph Nesse and Alan Lloyd have argued that these habits do not
safeguard the self against bizarre sexual wishes and fears (like having sex with
one's mother) but are tactics of self-deception: they suppress evidence that we
are not as beneficent or competent as we would like to think.78 As Jeff Gold-
blum said in The Big Chill, "Rationalizations are more important than sex."
When his friends demurred, he asked, "Have you ever gone a week without a
rationalization?"
264 / Know Thyself


A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American lag.
she doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses
the rags to clean her bathroom.
A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard
that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it
and ate it for dinner.
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken.
But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then
he cooks it and eats it.
Many moral philosophers would say that there is nothing wrong with these
acts, because private acts among consenting adults that do not harm other sen-
tient beings are not immoral. Some might criticize the acts using a more sub-
tle argument having to do with commitments to policies, but the infractions
would still be deemed minor compared with the truly heinous acts of which
people are capable. But for everyone else, such argumentation is beside the
point. People have gut feelings that give them emphatic moral convictions, and
they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact.3 These convictions
may have little to do with moral judgments that one could justify to others in
terms of their effects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the
neurobiological and evolutionary design of the organs we call moral emotions.
HAIDT HAS RECENTLY compiled a natural history of the emotions making
up the moral sense.* The four major families are just what we would expect
from Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism and the computer models of the
evolution of cooperation that followed. The other-condemning emotions-
contempt, anger, and disgust- prompt one to punish cheaters. The other-
praising emotions gratitude and an emotion that may be called elevation,
moral awe, or being moved- prompt one to reward altruists. The other-
suffering emotions-_-sympathy, compassion, and empathy- prompt one to
help a needy beneficiary. And the self-conscious emotions-_guilt, shame, and
embarrassment- prompt one to avoid cheating or to repair its effects.
Cutting across these sets of emotions we find a distinction among three
spheres of morality, each of which frames moral judgments in a different way.
The ethic of autonomy pertains to an individual's interests and rights. It em-
Phasizes fairness as the cardinal virtue, and is the core of morality as it is un-
derstood by secular educated people in Western cultures. The ethic of
community pertains to the mores of the social group; it includes values like
duty, respect, adherence to convention, and deference to a hierarchy. The ethic
of divinity pertains to a sense of exalted purity and holiness, which is opposed
to a sense of contamination and defilement.
The Sanctimonious Animal / 271


The autonomy-community-divinity trichotomy was first developed by
the anthropologist Richard Shweder, who noted that non-Western traditions
have rich systems of beliefs and values with all the hallmarks of moralizing
but without the Western concept of individual rights. The elaborate Hindu
beliefs surrounding purification are a prime example. Haidt and the py.
chologist Paul Rozin have built on Shweder's work, but they have interpreted
the moral spheres not as arbitrary cultural variants but as universal mental
faculties with different evolutionary origins and functions.? They show that
the moral spheres differ in their cognitive content, their homologues in
other animals, their physiological correlates, and their neural underpin-
nings.
Anger, for example, which is the other-condemning emotion in the sphere
of autonomy, evolved from systems for aggression and was recruited to imple-
ment the cheater-punishment strategy demanded by reciprocal altruism. Dis-
gust, the other-condemning emotion in the sphere of divinity, evolved from a
system for avoiding biological contaminants like disease and spoilage. It may
have been recruited to demarcate the moral circle that divides entities that we
engage morally (such as peers) from those we treat instrumentally (such as an-
imals) and those we actively avoid (such as people with a contagious disease).
Embarrassment, the self-conscious emotion in the sphere of community, is a
dead ringer for the gestures of appeasement and submission found in other
primates. The reason that dominance got melded with morality in the first
place is that reciprocity depends not only on a person's willingness to grant
and return favors but on that person's ability to do so, and dominant people
have that ability.
Relativists might interpret the three spheres of morality as showing that
individual rights are a parochial Western custom and that we should respect
other cultures' ethics of community and divinity as equally valid alternatives.
I conclude instead that the design of the moral sense leaves people in all cul-
tures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant pas-
sions and prejudices. The ethic of autonomy or fairness is in fact not uniquely
Western; Amartya Sen and the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon have shown
that it also has deep roots in Asian thought." Conversely, the ethic of commu-
nity and the ethic of divinity are pervasive in the West. The ethic of commu-
nity, which equates morality with a conformity to local norms, underlies the
cultural relativism that has become boilerplate on college campuses. Several
scholars have noticed that their students are unequipped to explain why
Nazis m was wrong, because the students feel it is impermissible to criticize the
values of another culture.° (I can confirm that students today reflexively hedge
their moral judgments, saying things like, "Our society puts a high value on
being good to other people.") Donald Symons comments on the way that peo-
272 / Know Thyself


ple's judgments can do a backhip when they switch from autonomy- to
community-based morality:
If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling,
screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed
her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the
only question would be how severely that person should be punished,
and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction.
But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being mag-
nified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes "culture," and thereby magi
cally becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by
some Western "moral thinkers," including feminists.?
The ethic of community also includes a deference to an established hier-
archy, and the mind (including the Western mind) all too easily conflates pres-
tige with morality. We see it in words that implicitly equate status with
virtue--chivalrous, classy, gentlemanly, honorable, noble- and low rank with
sin-low-class, low-rent, mean, nasty, shabby, shoddy, villain (originally mean-
ing "peasant"), vulgar. The Myth of the Noble Noble is obvious in contempo-
rary celebrity worship. Members of the royalty like Princess Diana and her
American equivalent, John F. Kennedy Jr., are awarded the trappings of saint-
hood even though they were morally unexceptional people (yes, Diana sup-
ported charities, but that's pretty much the job description of a princess in this
day and age). Their good looks brighten their halos even more, because people
judge attractive men and women to be more virtuous.' Prince Charles, who
also supports charities, will never be awarded the trappings of sainthood, even
if he dies a tragic death.
People also confuse morality with purity, even in the secular West. Re-
member from Chapter 1 that many words for cleanliness and dirt are also
words for virtue and sin (pure, unblemished, tainted, and so on). Haidt's sub-
jects seem to have conflated contamination with sin when they condemned
eating a dog, having sex with a dead chicken, and enjoying consensual incest
(which reflects our instinctive repulsion toward sex with siblings, an emotion
that evolved to deter inbreeding).
The mental mix-up of the good and the clean can have ugly consequences.
Racism and sexism are often expressed as a desire to avoid pollutants, as in
the ostracism of the "untouchable" caste in India, the sequestering of men-
struating women in Orthodox Judaism, the fear of contracting AIDS from ca-
sual contact with gay men, the segregated facilities for eating, drinking,
bathing, and sleeping under the Jim Crow and apartheid policies, and the
"racial hygiene" laws in Nazi Germany. One of the haunting questions of
The Sanctimonious Animal / 273


fire stations, stop funding social programs, medical research, foreign aid, and
national defense, or raise the income tax rate to 99 percent, if that is what it
would have cost to protect the environment.
Tetlock observes that these fiascos came about because any politician who
honestly presented the inexorable tradeoffs would be crucified for violating a
taboo. He would be guilty of "tolerating poisons in our food and water," or
worse, "putting a dollar value on human life." Policy analysts note that we are
stuck with wasteful and inegalitarian entitlement programs because any politi-
cian who tried to reform them would be committing political suicide. Savvy
opponents would frame the reform in the language of taboo: "breaking our
faith with the elderly," "betraying the sacred trust of veterans who risked their
lives for their country," "scrimping on the care and education of the young."
In the Preface, I called the Blank Slate a sacred doctrine and human nature
a modern taboo. This can now be stated as a technical hypothesis. The thrust
of the radical science movement was to moralize the scientific study of the
mind and to engage the mentality of taboo. Recall, from Part Il, the indignant
outrage, the punishment of heretics, the refusal to consider claims as they were
actually stated, the moral cleansing through demonstrations and manifestos
and public denunciations. Weizenbaum condemned ideas "whose very con-
templation ought to give rise to feelings of disgust" and denounced the less-
than-human scientists who "can even think of such a thing." But of course it is
the job of scholars to think about things, even if only to make it clear why they
are wrong. Moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a colli-
sion course.
THIS RUTHLESS DISSECTION Of the human moral sense does not mean that
morality is a sham or that every moralist is a self-righteous prig. Moral psy-
chology may be steeped in emotion, but then many philosophers have argued
that morality cannot be grounded in reason alone anyway. As Hume wrote,
'.'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the
scratching of my finger"7 The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, and guilt are
the source of innumerable acts of kindness great and small, and a measured
righteous anger and ethical certitude must have sustained great moral leaders
throughout history.
Glover notes that many twentieth-century atrocities were set in motion
when the moral emotions were disabled. Decent people were lulled into com-
mitting appalling acts by a variety of amoralizing causes, such as utopian ide-
ologies, phased decisions (in which the targets of bombing might shift from
isolated factories to factories near neighborhoods to the neighborhoods them-
selves), and the diffusion of responsibility within a bureaucracy. It was often
law moral sentiment- feeling empathy for victims, or asking oneself the
moral-identity question "Am I the kind of person who could do this?"
-that
The Sanctimonious Animal | 279


tries. In any case, only a bookworm who has never actually seen an American
movie or television program could believe that they glorify murderous fanat-
is like Timothy McVeigh or teenagers who randomly shoot classmates in high
school cafeterias. Masculine heroes in the mass media are highly moralistic:
they fight bad guys.
Among conservative politicians and liberal health professionals alike it is
an article of faith that violence in the media is a major cause of American vio-
lent crime. The American Medical Association, the American Psychological
Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics testified before Con-
gress that over 3,500 studies had investigated the connection and only 18 failed
to find one. Any social scientist can smell fishy numbers here, and the psy-
chologist Jonathan Freedman decided to look for himself. In fact, only two
hundred studies have looked for a connection between media violence and vi-
olent behavior, and more than half failed to find one.22 The others found cor-
relations that are small and readily explainable in other ways--for example,
that violent children seek out violent entertainment, and that children are
temporarily aroused (but not permanently affected) by action-packed
footage. Freedman and several other psychologists who have reviewed the lit-
erature have concluded that exposure to media violence has little or no effect
on violent behavior in the world.? Reality checks from recent history suggest
the same thing. People were more violent in the centuries before television and
movies were invented. Canadians watch the same television shows as Ameri-
cans but have a fourth their homicide rate. When the British colony of St. He-
lena installed television for the first time in 1995, its people did not become
more violent.? Violent computer games took off in the 1990s, a time when
crime rates plummeted.
What about the other usual suspects? Guns, discrimination, and poverty
play a role in violence, but in no case is it a simple or decisive one. Guns surely
make it easier for people to kill, and harder for them to de-escalate a fight be-
fore a death occurs, and thus multiply the lethality of conflicts large and small.
Nonetheless, many societies had sickening rates of violence before guns were
invented, and people do not automatically kill one another just because they
have access to guns. The Israelis and Swiss are armed to the teeth but have low
rates of violent personal crime, and among American states, Maine and North
Dakota have the lowest homicide rates but almost every home has a gun.? The
idea that guns increase lethal crime, though certainly plausible, has been so
difficult to prove that in 1998 the legal scholar John Lott published a book of
statistical analyses with a title that flaunts the opposite conclusion: More Guns,
Less Crime. Even if he is wrong, as I suspect he is, it is not so easy to show that
more guns mean more crime.
As for discrimination and poverty, again it is hard to show a direct cause-
and-effect relationship. Chinese immigrants to California in the nineteenth
Violence / 311


course even more calculating. Most people today live their adult lives without
ever pressing their violence buttons.
So what is the evidence that our species may have evolved mechanisms for
discretionary violence? The first thing to keep in mind is that aggression is an
organized, goal-directed activity, not the kind of event that could come from a
random malfunction. If your lawnmower continued to run after you released
the handle and it injured your foot, you might suspect a sticky switch or other
breakdown. But if the lawnmower lay in wait until you emerged from the
garage and then chased you around the yard, you would have to conclude that
someone had installed a chip that programmed it to do so.
The presence of deliberate chimpicide in our chimpanzee cousins raises
the possibility that the forces of evolution, not just the idiosyncrasies of a par-
ticular human culture, prepared us for violence. And the ubiquity of violence
in human societies throughout history and prehistory is a stronger hint that
we are so prepared.
When we look at human bodies and brains, we find more direct signs of
design for aggression. The larger size, strength, and upper-body mass of men
is a zoological giveaway of an evolutionary history of violent male-male com-
petition.* Other signs include the effects of testosterone on dominance and
violence (which we will encounter in the chapter on gender), the emotion of
anger (complete with reflexive baring of the canine teeth and clenching of the
fists), the revealingly named fight-or-flight response of the autonomic ner-
vous system, and the fact that disruptions of inhibitory systems of the brain
(by alcohol, damage to the frontal lobe or amygdala, or defective genes in-
volved in serotonin metabolism) can lead to aggressive attacks, initiated by
circuits in the limbic system. 12
Boys in all cultures spontaneously engage in rough-and-tumble play,
which is obviously practice for fighting. They also divide themselves into co-
alitions that compete aggressively (calling to mind the remark attributed to
the Duke of Wellington that "the Battle of Waterloo was won upon the playing
fields of Eton").43 And children are violent well before they have been infected
by war toys or cultural stereotypes. The most violent age is not adolescence but
toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half the boys just past the age of
two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting,
and kicking. As the author pointed out, "Babies do not kill each other, because
we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question ... we've been
trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But)
that's the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to
aggress."
Violence continues to preoccupy the mind throughout life. According to
independent surveys in several countries by the psychologists Douglas Ken-
rick and David Buss, more than 80 percent of women and 90 percent of men
316/ Hot Buttons


fathers nor in the homes of their husbands; unprotected, lonely, and out of
sync with their inborn nature. Some women positively welcome this state of
affairs, but most do not."8
There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism
and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. To
repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are inter-
changeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or
constrained by the average properties of their group. In the case of gender, the
barely defeated Equal Rights Amendment put it succinctly: "Equality of Rights
under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state
on account of sex." If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths
about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality. Nor should any-
one invoke sex differences to justify discriminatory policies or to hector
women into doing what they don't want to do.
In any case, what we do know about the sexes does not call for any action
that would penalize or constrain one sex or the other. Many psychological
traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same
on average for men and women, and virtually all psychological traits may be
found in varying degrees among the members of each sex. No sex difference
yet discovered applies to every last man compared with every last woman, so
generalizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And no-
tions like "proper role" and "natural place" are scientifically meaningless and
give no grounds for restricting freedom.
Despite these principles, many feminists vehemently attack research on
sexuality and sex differences. The politics of gender is a major reason that the
application of evolution, genetics, and neuroscience to the human mind is bit-
terly resisted in modern intellectual life. But unlike other human divisions such
as race and ethnicity, where any biological differences are minor at most and
scientifically uninteresting, gender cannot possibly be ignored in the science of
human beings. The sexes are as old as complex life and are a fundamental topic
in evolutionary biology, genetics, and behavioral ecology. To disregard them in
the case of our own species would be to make a hash of our understanding of
our place in the cosmos. And of course differences between men and women
affect every aspect of our lives. We all have a mother and a father, are attracted
to members of the opposite sex (or notice our contrast with the people who
are), and are never unaware of the sex of our siblings, children, and friends. To
ignore gender would be to ignore a major part of the human condition.
The goal of this chapter is to clarify the relation between the biology of
human nature and current controversies on the sexes, including the two most
incendiary, the gender gap and sexual assault. With both of these hot buttons,
I will argue against the conventional wisdom associated with certain people
who claim to speak on behalf of feminism. That may create an illusion that the
340 / Hot Buttons


have higher levels than nonviolent criminals; trial lawyers have higher lev.
els than those who push paper. The relations are complicated for a num-
ber of reasons. Over a broad range of values, the concentration of
testosterone in the bloodstream doesn't matter. Some traits, such as spatial
abilities, peak at moderate rather than high levels. The effects of testos-
terone depend on the number and distribution of receptors for the mole-
cule, not just on its concentration. And one's psychological state can affect
testosterone levels as well as the other way around. But there is a causal re-
lation, albeit a complicated one. When women preparing for a sex-change
operation are given androgens, they improve on tests of mental rotation
and get worse on tests of verbal fluency. The journalist Andrew Sullivan,
whose medical condition had lowered his testosterone levels, describes the
effects of injecting it: "The rush of a T shot is not unlike the rush of going
on a first date or speaking before an audience. I feel braced. After one in-
jection, I almost got in a public brawl for the first time in my life. There is
always a lust peak- every time it takes me unaware."S Though testos-
terone levels in men and women do not overlap, variations in level have
similar kinds of effects in the two sexes. High-testosterone women smile
less often and have more extramarital affairs, a stronger social presence,
and even a stronger handshake.
• Women's cognitive strengths and weaknesses vary with the phase of their
menstrual cycle.* When estrogen levels are high, women get even better at
tasks on which they typically do better than men, such as verbal fluency.
When the levels are low, women get better at tasks on which men typically
do better, such as mental rotation. A variety of sexual motives, including
their taste in men, vary with the menstrual cycle as well.47
• Androgens have permanent effects on the developing brain, not just tran-
sient effects on the adult brain. 1% Girls with congenital adrenal hyperpla-
sia overproduce androstenedione, the androgen hormone made famous
by the baseball slugger Mark McGwire. Though their hormone levels are
brought to normal soon after birth, the girls grow into tomboys, with
more rough-and-tumble play, a greater interest in trucks than dolls, better
spatial abilities, and, when they get older, more sexual fantasies and at-
tractions involving other girls. Those who are treated with hormones only
later in childhood show male patterns of sexuality when they become
young adults, including quick arousal by pornographic images, an au-
tonomous sex drive centered on genital stimulation, and the equivalent of
wet dreams.19
• The ultimate fantasy experiment to separate biology from socialization
would be to take a baby boy, give him a sex-change operation, and have his
parents raise him as a girl and other people treat him as one. If gender is
socially constructed, the child should have the mind of a normal girl; if it
348 / Hot Buttons


too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology,
the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability--stripping away
pretense to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!
Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw
colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a
learned social construction. As we saw in preceding chapters, the visual system
of the brain comprises some fifty regions that take raw pixels and effortlessly
organize them into surfaces, colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects.
We can no more turn the system off and get immediate access to pure sensory
experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release
their digestive enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a
hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to feed us
information about the consequential things out there, like rocks, cliffs, ani-
mals, and other people and their intentions.
Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical structure
of the world. It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and
aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of
deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a
pretty face than at a plain one.4 Babies prefer consonant musical intervals
over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing
and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.5o
When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate
them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a
stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of art at face value, but
try to guess why the producers came out with them and what effect they hope
to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of course, people can be taken in by
a clever liar, but they are not trapped in a false world of words and images and
in need of rescue by postmodernist artists.
Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge an-
other feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, espe-
cially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the psychology of art is entangled
with the psychology of esteem, with its appreciation of the rare, the sumptu-
ous, the virtuosic, and the dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek
rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling per-
formance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial
turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has docu-
mented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation, and emo-
tonal charge until the evocative potential of the style is fully exploited."
Attention then turns to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to à
new one. Martindale attributes this cycle to habituation on the part of the au-
dience, but it also comes from the desire for attention on the part of the artists.
412 / Hot Buttons


Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme
in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of per-
formance art in itselt. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical the-
orists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for
"inguistic transpareney" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world
more radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market
commodity.»° This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad
Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages
found in scholarly books and articles."' In 1998, first prize went to the lauded
professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence;
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of
hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, conver-
gence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the
thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in
which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugu-
rate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contin-
gent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest, assures
us that this is not a satire. The rules of the contest forbid it: "Deliberate parody
cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread."
A final blind spot to human nature is the failure of contemporary artists
and theorists to deconstruct their own moral pretensions. Artists and critics
have long believed that an appreciation of elite art is ennobling and have spo-
ken of cultural philistines in tones ordinarily reserved for child molesters (as
We see in the two meanings of the word barbarian). The affectation of social
reform that surrounds modernism and postmodernism is part of this tradi-
tion.
Though moral sophistication requires an appreciation of history and cul-
tural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are a particularly
good way to instill it compared with middlebrow realistic fiction or traditional
education. The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to
how people entertain themselves in their leisure time. The conviction that
artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising
trom the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our circuitry
for status (see Chapter 15). As the critic George Steiner has pointed out,
know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play
bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
Conversely there must be many unlettered people who give blood, risk their
The Arts / 415


lives as volunteer firefighters, or adopt handicapped children, but whose opin-
ion of modern art is "My four-year-old daughter could have done that."
The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to be
proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal lives, and
many embraced fascism or Stalinism. The modernist composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen described the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as "the great-
est work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" and added, enviously, that
"artists, too, sometimes go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceiv-
able, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world'62 Nor is
the theory of postmodernism especially progressive. A denial of objective real-
ity is no friend to moral progress, because it prevents one from saying, for ex-
ample, that slavery or the Holocaust really took place. And as Adam Gopnik
has pointed out, the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are ut-
terly banal, like "racism is bad! But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are
made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no
claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle
class- personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoid-
ance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy--are good things, not
bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists
are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations.
Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to
join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want
to hang a painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it's
none of our damn business.
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century
grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and
insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And
they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
A REVOLT HAS begun. Museum-goers have become bored with the
umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring dismembered torsos or hun-
dreds of pounds of lard chewed up and spat out by the artist.63 Graduate stu-
dents in the humanities are grumbling in emails and conference hallways
about being locked out of the job market unless they write in gibberish while
randomly dropping the names of authorities like Foucault and Butler. Maver-
ick scholars are doffing the blinders that prevented them from looking at ex-
citing developments in the sciences of human nature. And younger artists are
wondering how the art world got itself into the bizarre place in which beauty
is a dirty word.
These currents of discontent are coming together in a new philosophy of
the arts, one that is consilient with the sciences and respectful of the minds
416 / Hot Buttons