sweep

the following has been extracted from Steven Pinkers: The blank slate


The noble savage, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been “strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies.” I looked up these “studies, which were collected in Ashley Montagu’s Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lrenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist Wiliam Golding (author of lord of the Flies_. Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologosts themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.” In any case, the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare. Nor did montagu’s summary essay, which simply rehashed attacks on the concept of “instinct” from decades of behaviourists. One of the only chapters with data “refuted” Lorenz’s claims about warfare and raiding in the Ute indians by saying they didn’t do it any more than other native groups!

Twenty years later, Gould wrote that “Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species. ” His new argument comes from what he calls the Great Asymmetry. It is “an essential truth, ” he writes, that “good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one” Moreover, “we perform 10,000 acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rear, but sadly balancing, moment of cruelty.” The statistics making up this “essential truth” are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are definitely not “good and kind people,” make up about three or four percent of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent. But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as ”evil and destructive.” 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 balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it “evil”. Also, does it make sense to 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 constructive ones. If we do, on 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. ” 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. ” 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 predisposition 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 xenophobia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others replete 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 programmed 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 word 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.

In this passage Gould presents a more-or –less reasonable summary of why scientists might think that human violence can be illuminated by evolution. But then he casually slips in some outrageous non sequiturs (“an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility, ” “we cannot be blamed”, as if the scientists had no choice but to believe those, too. He concludes his essay:

In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered…, and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel…. Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately, shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise

The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a stand in favour of genocide!

The Other Michael

Hi Sweep,

Could you go through that post and indicate what is the quoted text and what is your commentary on it. It isn't very clear to me if you've just quoted an entire passage, or actually have commentary of your own (the former is not encouraged).

thanks,
Michael
MF&P Moderator, First Class

sweep

It isn't mine: the entire passage is Steven Pinkers work- why isn't the former encouraged?

The Other Michael

Hi sweep,

This is a discussion board. Just quoting someone elses work doesn't really seem like discussion, does it?

Quoting it is fine, but how about telling everyone why you thought it was worth starting a thread and quoting it, what passages you found especially telling and for what reasons etc?

So your posting excerpts is fine, but we get antsy when a big block of text is thrown up without any commentary, especially when the provenence of the work is not terribly clear (is this persons work copyrighted, do you have permission, etc etc?).

We don't want to see dueling quotes, where one person throws up a passage from George Smith, and another throws up something by whosisname, the "Titus Groan" apologetics guy, and so on and so forth.

We're interested in what YOU have to say, though your comments can be in regards someone else's comments.

cheers,
Michael
MF&P Moderator, First Class

sweep

alright, I was hoping for a commentary from some of the 'brainier' (more knowledgable) people on this board, but it appears that I will have to make a start. I hoped that some input would aid me, as I continue reading from the book from which the opening passage was derived.

It seems that the idea of the peaceful native is false; the statistics on this issue show that, as a percentage, the number of male deaths caused by warfare from indigenous people is between five and thirty times greater than the people of the States and Europe in two world wars.

The idea that people are naturally kind and peaceful, isn't true. We are naturally murderous and violent, even though modernised societies are the least violent, proportionally.

I have heard it said, and I believe this, that the difference between primates, the 'lower' animal species and homo sapiens, is that we have ideas (aside from differences in form). It occurs to me that we have, for a very long time, in our history been at war with ourselves. People actively deny, and seek to deny their nature. We close ourselves behind walls, shroud ourselves in theology, romanticism and art. People don't like losing control, least of all over the body, which begins as our master, and ends as our master.

The consciousness, and self awareness is such a tiny voice, that, it could be posited, has only a cursory background spanning no more than a few thousand years. Since humans broke the primordial pattern, people have settled, and have had time to make tools, which include those needed for war. Over time rationality has become more diverse, the body of knowledge has expanded too, giving rise to more efficient ways of sustaining and destroying life. Along with this, methods of social control, religion and morals have grown in order to keep nature in check.

Why do we deny our nature, and is it natural to fight our own nature and others? Are ideas the 'supernature'; the new cortex, a resolution to our older, more primitive nature? Are the more fervently religious the ones who need to control their natural, violent impulses?

back to my book then>>

Infinity Lover

...one way in which we have also evolved, is by aquiring the skill to manipulate our environment, and surpress natural urges that aren't favourable to our habitat.

For instance we can build toilets and potty train ourselves.

For as far as agression is in our nature, it's also in our nature to get a grip on that agression, and apply ourselves to peacefully co-exist for our sakes... we still have a lot of learning and growing to do in that respect.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

In an NPR interview with Jane Goodall recently, she described how she and her fellow researchers came across the aftermath of a war between the males of two different tribes of chimpanzees.

They didn't think it was possible, they certainly didn't want to admit it was possible, but there it was.

A chimpanzee war.

Think about that!

Keith.

sweep

I didn't realise you could be so facetious, infinity

Perhaps the war is over for you: "mummy, (I shit)... but I don't feel guilty about it anymore."

I love cheeky monkies, they're so human. I'm sure the American military have tried training them to use modern arms, but they weren't too hot with radio commands.

One of the problems with savages is that the 'savage' savage is deemed necessary for the justification of their destruction, only when it suits the 'suits'. The following passage follows the human idea of 'geo-centricity'. People tend to see theirselves as special in the universe, at the expense of other factions. Those who oppose such an idea, must be struck down. Our sense of right and wrong, it seems, serves the purpose of making ourselves more special; our ideas are more valuable than our fellows, our music tastes make us better, and our choise of clothes is more tasteful.

Only when we eliminate our values, particularly when it comes to ideas, can objectivity prevail. When we realise that we are all worthless, and everything we hold dear also becomes worthless, then inequality is removed, contrary to the belief that we must have a sense of sanctimony, in the sense that we look up and down at other things. Our attentional biases, might have something to do with innate differences, and determine our tastes in combination with environmental factors. In doing so 'what we like' seems arbitrary, but it needs no justification, thereby we need no arbiter telling us 'just what we like and what we don't'.

We also produce 'shit' naturally, but as a loving parent knows, a child is loved unconditionally despite all the shit it causes, and it isn't bad for producing it. Thereby, we lessen the war, and in our hearts, all is equal.


Here is a little more of Steven Pinkers work, followed by a brief passage by Galileo, to accompany my commentary.


None of this escaped Galileo as he was pounding away at his link. He know that he could not simply argue on empirical grounds that the division between a corrupt Earth and the unchanging heavens was falsified buy sunspots, novas, and moons drifting across Jupiter. He also argued that the moral trappings of the geocentric theory were as dubious as its empirical claims, so if the theory turned out to be false, no one would be the worse. Here is Galileo’s alter ego in Dialogue Concerning the two chief world Systems, wondering what is so great about being invariant and inalterable:

For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If, not being subject to any changes, it were a vast desert of sand or mountain of jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters which covered it had frozen, and it had remained an enormous globe of ice where nothing was ever born or ever altered of changed, I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially nonexistent. This is exactly the difference between a living animal and a dead one; and I say the same of the moon, of Jupiter, and of all other world globes.

… Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, etcetera, are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Suck men really deserve to encounter a Medusa’s head, which would transmute them into statues of jasper of diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are.