Socrates' biopolitical science

Plato’s Gorgias begins with a scene that could borrow the soundtrack from Westside Story.  Gorgias, a famous orator, has just demonstrated his talents before an audience at the house of a wealthy and powerful Athenian politician named Callicles.  The two are standing with a third trained orator, Polus, as people do after the show is over, when Socrates and his entourage approach.  You can easily imagine Socrates’ student Chaerephon and whoever else is with them‑Plato? Xenophon?‑snapping their fingers in rhythm with the swing of the orchestra.  The first word of the dialogue is Πολέμου, the Greek word for war.

Socrates engages in three dialogues, with Gorgias, Polus, and then Callicles.  A lot of the next two thousand years of the history of philosophy play out before your eyes.  I concentrate here on his conversation with Polus. 

Polus has been trained in the art of persuasion.  He believes that this art can empower him to convince anyone of anything.  That means that he can convince a jury of his or anyone else’s innocence regardless of the evidence.  He has a get out of jail free card. 

Why is such a power valuable?  To Polus, it is obvious: you can abuse, rob, or kill anyone you want to.  He thinks everyone would want such a power and is charmed by the thought that he, unlike almost everyone else, possesses it.  The power to kill without regard to justice is his treasure. 

Socrates destroys Polus with a simple disjunctive syllogism.  He asks Polus which is better: to do injustice without paying a penalty or to do injustice and suffer the penalty?  Polus insist that the first is obviously better than the second.  So far, so good.  Then Socrates asks which is more disgusting?  Polus admits the obvious.  To do injustice and get away with it is disgusting. 

It seems that Polus could hardly deny it.  His name is pronounced almost the same as polis, the Greek word for the political community.  How do we, the people of this polis‑Athens, the United States of America‑see it when we think that someone has done a terrible thing and gotten away with it?  We are disgusted. 

The Greek word for disgusting is αἴσχιον.  It indicates both moral and physical ugliness.  It is frequently translated as “shameful” or “foul.”  Socrates points out that if something is αἴσχιον it is either unpleasant or bad for you or both. 

I offer my own illustrations.  Spoiled meat is unpleasant and bad for you.  Reattaching a severed finger by the application of leaches is disgusting enough, but good for you if it works.  Shooting heroin is the very opposite of unpleasant; it is, however, disgusting because it is very bad for you. 

Since killing with impunity is not unpleasant to the murderer at least, it must be bad for you.  You shouldn’t do it, if you know what you are doing. 

Here is the disjunctive syllogism.  If killing without penalty is disgusting, then either it is unpleasant or it is bad for you.  It isn’t unpleasant to kill without penalty (it’s exquisite! Polus insists).  Therefore; it is bad for you. 

1.       (D É (U Ú B))

2.      D

3.      (U Ú B)

4.      ~U

5.      \ B

If you don’t follow the symbolic logic, take my word for it.  This is a logically valid proof.  If the premises are true, the conclusion is inescapable.

At this point I can introduce a little biosocial science.  The same part of the brain that is engaged when we sense something physically disgusting‑running sores or spoiled meat‑is engaged when we view something morally disgusting‑someone abusing a child or cheating a friend.  If the one clearly functions to help us avoid what is bad for us, it is likely that the latter functions the same way. 

Today I read a study by Tom R. Kupfer and Roger Giner-Sorolla: Communicating Moral Motives: The Social Signaling Function of Disgust, from the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science.  The results of the study indicate that when someone expresses disgust in reaction to some moral violation such as cheating a friend, she is signaling to others that she cares about moral principles and is prepared to join others in enforcing them.  That is good for her because it attracts other similar partners.  It is good for us, because it makes it possible for us to trust one another and so cooperate more effectively.

At some point in our evolutionary history, our biological capacity for disgust was harnessed by our evolved psychological mechanisms for cooperation.  Doing injustice without paying a price may be good for the individual in the short run but it is bad for the political community and therefore bad for its members in the long run. 

Socrates didn’t know about evolution.  He understood the truth about justice and injustice perfectly.  Only now is modern science catching up to him. 

Political Science

I have been reading a very interesting article tonight, in the Atlantic: The Nastiest Feud in Science.  It is a feud that I have been interested in for decades.  The issue concerns what killed off the dinosaurs, and it has divided scientists concerned with this question into two hostile factions. 

The majority faction holds that the dinosaurs went extinct due to a sudden event: an asteroid, “larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs.”  This is the “bad weekend” thesis.  By Monday, the dinosaurs were history. 

The minority faction holds that the major extinction event that included the dinosaurs but also almost all the rest of the creatures on earth was a much more gradual process.  The culprit here was a series of eruptions in East Central India, the Deccan Traps, that went on for 350,000 years. 

Both sides have strong evidence to bring to the table.  Deposits of iridium are found all over the world that seem to have been deposited at the same time as the mass extinction and that must have come from the asteroid collision.  On the other hand, “at the same time” is ambiguous in geological terms.  The big boom may have come 200,000 years before the mass extinction.  That’s a long weekend. 

What is clear is that the two sides do not merely disagree.  They despise one another and have long been at war with one another.  They accuse each other of any number of scientific sins in the most bitter of terms.  The asteroidsheviks have gone to great lengths to torpedo the careers of any scholar who dares challenge their thesis. 

I am a student of Plato and so I know very well that philosophical and scientific quarrels almost always become political quarrels.  Socrates relentlessly embarrassed the sophists and orators of ancient Athens and they responded by using the machinery of the Athenian court to kill him.  This conflict became political in a more direct sense because Socrates’ enemies included politically powerful men.  See The Enemies of Socrates. 

The quarrel between the worshipers of asteroid and those of the volcanoes is much the same.  A key to the larger political question implicated by this quarrel about ancient geological history lies in this passage in Bianca Bosker’s Atlantic piece. 

Understanding the cause of the mass extinction is not an esoteric academic endeavor. Dinosaurs are what paleontologists call “charismatic megafauna”: sexy, sympathetic beasts whose obliteration transfixes pretty much anyone with a pulse. The nature of their downfall, after 135 million years of good living, might offer clues for how we can prevent, or at least delay, our own end.

When someone who is not an idiot writes a passage like that, you can be sure that there is something else going on.  Let’s consider: if the one side is right, all we have to do is figure out how to shoot down asteroids.  If the other side is right, all we have to do is figure out how to plug volcanoes.  Allow me to humbly suggest that neither can “offer clues for how we can prevent, or at least delay, our own end.” 

I suspect, though, that the tide may soon turn in favor of the volcano side.  Greenhouse gasses produced by human industry look a lot more like volcanoes than like asteroids.  Of course, this is only a metaphor.  Comparing the human activity over the last century to a range of volcanoes pumping out clouds of gases for hundreds of thousands of years is like comparing a Florida sink hole to the Grand Canyon.  The volcano thesis tells us nothing useful about the climate change question.  In politics, however, that is not what matters.  What matters is the emotional impact. 

I am a climate lukewarmer.  I don’t doubt that the world warmed significantly over the last century and I think the evidence supports the claim that human activity had something to do with this.  I am not at all certain that this bodes ill for human beings and most other creatures.  I am certain that we are not going to do anything significant in the short run to control global emissions.  I am very certain that the dinosaurs aren’t going to teach us what to do. 

The Bosker piece is, I suspect, largely intended to support the alarmist agenda on climate change.  Read reasonably, it does the opposite.  The same politics that infects the dinosaur controversy infects the climate change controversies.  Anyone who doubts the alarmist agenda is vilified.  Bosker’s piece suggests that we should be suspicious of everyone on both sides of such questions. 

Science is the best guide we have to the nature of the world.  Scientists, however, are just as human as anyone else.  Man, as Aristotle boldly claimed, is the political animal. 

Darwin vs. the Progressives

I may be one of the only scholars to escape Claremont without being or becoming obsessed with the Progressives.  As a result, I have never paid much attention to John Dewey or Woodrow Wilson or the rest of that lot.  The general idea, if I get it, is that the Progressives wanted to empower the people and get rid of silly constitutional limitations on the popular will‑guided, of course, by experts in the sciences of politics and economics. 

I have just finished reading a paper about the use of “Darwinism” by the Progressives.  I can’t site the paper, because it is a draft of what will be presented at the panel I am chairing at the meeting of the International Political Science Association in Brisbane, Australia.  By the way, that’s Brisbin to those in the know.  It is a wonderful introduction to Progressive thought, so now I know more than I really want to know. 

This is my summary of the paper, for which the unnamed author bears no responsibility.  The Progressives believed that modern science could produce much more efficient societies, free from the old evils of factionalism, greed, etc., if only it could get complete command of the powers of government.  Standing in the way of that complete command were the constitutional devices—separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, etc. 

To fully empower government to do what the Progressives thought it could do, they had to get rid of those obstacles.  To do that, they had to discredit the philosophical principles on which the constitutional order was based.  The Founders believed that they understood human nature.  The believe that human tendencies toward corruption and self-destruction could not be eradicated, they could only be ameliorated.  That is what limited government was designed to achieve. 

The Progressives attempted to undermine the Founding principles by attacking the idea of a fixed human nature.  The Founder’s work made sense by the light of late 18^th century science, they argued, but science has moved on.  We now know that human nature changes just like everything else does.  We can mold ourselves into new and better beings, free from the moral infirmities of our predecessors, if only be can break free of the shackles they put in place. 

This is where Darwin comes in.  At the very least, Darwinian evolution allowed the Progressives to argue that human nature was not something fixed; therefore, a political doctrine based on the idea of natural rights was untenable.  However, Darwin didn’t give the Progressives what they really needed.  They needed the idea that history had a direction from the primitive and bad toward the advanced and good.  They got that, more or less consciously, from Hegel and Marx.  Without the latter, the idea of a changing human nature provides no comforts, let alone a promise of liberation. 

If I get all this right, Darwinism was little more than a gloss—if a very useful gloss—on Progressive doctrine.  It allowed them to dismiss the idea of human nature without much serious thought.  They didn’t have to understand it; they just needed to employ it as a slogan. 

To put it charitably, the Progressives’ view of Darwin was a little more sophisticated than Adolph Hitler’s understanding of genetics.  In Mein Kampf, which I haven’t read and neither have you, Hitler apparently argued that if someone from a superior race mates with someone of an inferior race, you get children who are mediocre.  The problem, of course, is that genetics doesn’t work that way at all.  Breeding a tall animal with a short one might get you middle sized offspring, but it also might give you some tall offspring and some short ones.  Genetics is digital rather than analogical. 

The problem with the Progressives’ view of Darwinian theory is threefold.  The most important problem is that evolution by natural selection is not fundamentally progressive.  It shapes organisms for their respective ecological niches, but that can mean simpler, dumber creatures as often as more complex and smarter creatures. 

It is true that there is a progressive dimension in the history of evolution.  All organisms are autonomous in the sense that they resist the influence of environmental forces.  That is what it means to be alive.  The increases in organic complexity over time map onto increases in autonomy: warm blooded animals segregate their organs from one another and maintain their body temperature in order to (adaptationist language here) be more independent from the local environment. 

The second problem with the Progressive view of Darwinism is that it completely ignores the relevant time frames.  Yes, the human species has changed over time; however, it matters how much change and how much time we are talking about.  According to most current accounts, human beings have been pretty much the same animals for at least fifty-thousand years.  Have we changed enough since Romulus and Remus, let alone Jefferson and Madison, to make a practical difference for political theory?  No.  If the Founder’s theory was good enough for human beings two hundred and forty-two years ago, no contemporary evolutionary theory will undermine it. 

The final and most important problem is that species do not change in all parts of their organic structure at the same rates and some parts of them do not change much at all.  While the simplistic model of the triune brain—reptilian, mammalian, and neomammalian—may be discarded, the basic idea is sound: evolution doesn’t work transforming existing organisms into brand new ones, but by reorganizing what it has already got and keeping what works.  

Human beings may be more than animals (I think we are) but we are at least animals.  Almost all of what our ancestor was before she split into Pan and Homo lines is still in both of us.  Most of the earliest mammal is still in our neocortex.  The reptile was not purged; he was reassigned. 

Human beings are such interesting and promising creatures precisely because we carry within us the history of our organic predecessors, back to the Ur organism and yet have achieved a human world.  The organic burdens are part and parcel of the organic promise.  We still come into this world, eat and defecate, and go out of it the same way our dogs do. 

The political principles of the Founding recognized both sides of the coin.  We are capable of living beautiful lives; yet to do this, we have to manage our animal nature.  The Founders were wise and mature in their thought.  The Progressives were naïve and simple minded. 

Species Ancient & Modern

I seemed to have misplaced my copy of Natural Right and History, one of the three books that most shaped the beginning of my career as a scholar.  In case you are wondering, the other two were Aristotle’s Politics and Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided.  I encountered all three in a course I took with Jeff Wallin at Arkansas State University, many moons ago.  At any rate, I am going from memory here and, dare I say, deploying my own examples.  No one should blame Strauss, Wallin, Jaffa, or Aristotle for my reflections. 

According to Leo Strauss, philosophy begins with the discovery of nature.  Prior to that discovery, human beings were well aware that different things had different ways.  Menstruation was the way of women and peeing on posts was the way of dogs, just as a life of military training was the way of Spartans and a life of wine was the way of Athenians. 

Nature was discovered when someone in ancient Asia Minor realized that there was a difference between the fact that some people burn their dead and some people don’t and the fact that fire always goes up whether you are among the one people or the other.  The ways of peoples are partly determined by convention.  We do it this way because we agree that this is the way it should be done.  Other peoples do it differently. 

On the other hand, no one dishes up grains of sand or puts their latrines in their kitchens.  These ways are determined not by convention but by nature.  The philosophers tried to understand nature‑the things that did not change from one political community to another and that were, apparently, the same everywhere and always.  When philosophy turned to examine politics, with Socrates, the task was to determine how the various regimes emerged from one common human nature. 

Strauss came back to me yesterday when I encountered the following passage from the great philosopher of biology: Ernst Mayr.  The passage is addressed to a certain position in the philosophy of biology concerning the concept of the species.  Darwin himself seemed to accept this position in his Origin of the Species.  It is called nominalism, the view that species concepts like horse or housefly are entirely conventional, arbitrary groupings that we make up as we go.  Mayr would have none of that.  From Towards a New Philosophy of Biology:

I have always thought that there is no more devastating refutation of the nominalistic claims than the fact that primitive natives in New Guinea, with a Stone Age culture, recognize as species exactly the same entities of nature as western taxonomists.  If species were something purely arbitrary, it would be totally improbable for representatives of two drastically different cultures to arrive at the identical species delimitations.  Although a few nominalists still survive, it is now almost unanimously agreed that there are real discontinuities in nature, delimiting different species.

It’s pretty obvious to common sense that a house cat and a housefly belong to different species; but what about a dog and a wolf?  Some of the former look very much like the latter and they can breed together.  What about a horse and a donkey?  They can have a mule as a child but cannot have grandchildren.  Things get much messier when you look at plants, let alone microorganisms.  Is it possible that our species concepts are merely convenient? 

Mayr offers us a reason to reject that idea.  If a stone age culture marks out the same species distinctions as modern western taxonomists, then those distinction are probably not cultural artifacts. 

What strikes me about Mayr’s proof is that it makes precisely the distinction that Strauss points out.  Species are ontologically real because they do not change from one set of conventions to another.  The various species that we all recognize are not conventional categories but natural categories. 

I have been writing a paper for the meeting of the International Political Science Association in Brisbane, Australia, next month.  My topic is Darwin and the Declaration of Independence.  One common criticism of Darwinian biology is that it is incompatible with the Declaration’s account of natural rights.  The latter states that “all men are created equal.”  The critics claim that Darwinian biology destroys the concept of species as natural kinds and so precludes the argument in the Declaration.  How can all me be created equal if there aren’t really any human beings, if the human species is a mere convenience, imposed on a smear of organisms differing from on another only in degree? 

I think I have shown, in the current draft of my paper, that Darwinian biology allows for species distinctions that are more than robust enough for the purposes of the Declaration.  What Mayr’s proof shows is that the species concept in modern biology can be defended on grounds that go back to the very origins of philosophy in ancient Greece.  I am content with that. 

Which came first: family or polis?

Which comes first: the political community or the family?  This strike me as a theoretically interesting question.  I am sure that it is a politically interesting one.  I suppose that most conservatives would be offended by the suggestion that the political community is in any way prior to the family.  To suggest as much might seem to authorize the examples of heavy-handed government intervention into parental decisions that we have recently seen in Britain.  That, after all, is why we sent the British government packing not quite so recently. 

As often happens, first glance is not the penetrating glance.  To argue that the family is fundamental (either because it is natural or because it is private) and government merely artificial in fact liberates government.  Political institutions can represent a leap into freedom from the individual and the biological foundations of life. 

That is a good deal of what left-wing social science wants to say.  I recently looked at a sociology text on the family.  It presented the family as an institution akin to slavery, with the mother and daughter in bondage.  In good Marxist fashion, the state can liberate the bond servants because it represents a Hegelian antithesis to the primitive familial institution. 

Unfortunately for this position, it works both ways.  If the political association is altogether new and unencumbered by the familial association, then the latter is also independent of the political association.  For that reason, as long as families continue to exist, they serve as a core or resistance to progressive government.  If familial bonding cannot be wiped out, and all evidence is that it cannot be wiped out, neither the final state nor even a genuine republic is possible.  The liberation of the political from the familial makes the problems of nepotism and tribalism unsolvable. 

Here, a theoretical approach may be helpful.  There are two senses in which one thing can be prior to another.  One is temporal priority.  The baby is temporally prior to the child and the latter to the adolescent.  The other is logical priority.  The door is logically prior to the doorknob because the former makes sense without the latter but not vice versa. 

In recent biosocial research, there has been a shift in thinking about the temporal priority of the family and the polis.  The older hypothesis held for a long time.  In Aristotle’s account (see the Politics Book 1) the first human association is the union of male and female, i.e., the family.  A union of families leads to the clan, of clans to the village, and the union of families leads to the polis. 

Aristotle was not making natural history here.  He is only trying to understand the polis by breaking it down into its constituent associations.  He does suggest that this might be the basis for a natural history when he says that men suppose the gods to be ruled by kings since that is how their more primitive societies were ruled.  At any rate, to make this into an evolutionary account, one need only suppose that men and women once mated as solitary animals as do bears.  We can then present this hypothesis as follows:

1.       Solitary animals

2.      Nuclear families

3.      Extended families

4.      Bands

5.      Communities

This progression plays out over time.  I am using Robin Dunbar’s numbers here.  He has evidence that the steps from 2 to 5 scale up by threes: 5, 15, 50, 150.  I note that Dunbar, like Aristotle, is analyzing existing social orders and not presenting a history.  It makes sense, however, that more complex communities emerge out of simpler ones in a step by step fashion.  It just didn’t happen that way. 

The new hypothesis that is emerging goes like this.  Human beings left the trees (or the trees left them) as solitary foragers.  It was every man and women for his and herself.  They coalesced into groups because the group was the only protection they had against predators.  Travelling together, they foraged together and quickly became dependent on one another.  A group can forage much more effectively, especially if they are hunting and willing to share. 

The first step in the evolution of human cooperation was obligate collaborative foraging, according to Michael Tomasello.  It was collaborative because we did it all at the same time, even though we were only doing what we would do if alone.  It was obligate because we had come to depend on the collaboration to get enough to eat. 

Tomasello’s second step was the emergence of group mindedness.  We began to think of our fellow hunter-gatherers as “us” as opposed to “them”.  At that point, I would argue, we are already talking about a political community.  There is a high degree of collaboration and a common interest. 

To get further, one must include the hypothesis of Christopher Boehm.  He brought to light the “egalitarian syndrome”.  All known hunter-gather communities display an egalitarian ethos.  Meat is shared.  Bullies, who want to push their weight around and take more than their share of the spoils, are ruthlessly suppressed.  Free riders, who want to share in the spoils without investing effort, are dealt with in the same way. 

The egalitarian ethos protects each individual against any bully in the group.  What needs protecting?  The bully can’t boss you around or go up side of your head without group sanction.  He can’t take your stuff.  Neither can he take your mate.  This, I submit, was the origin of the human familial association.  The group recognized this mate as your mate and gave you some reason to believe that these offspring were your offspring.  The investment of the father in his offspring can now be selected for.  If the father knows his children, so also the brothers know one another.  Familial instincts can be selected for. 

If this is correct, then the human family is a product of the primitive political community.  It is group recognition that makes a family.  It didn’t stop there.  If the group could recognize kinship by blood it could also recognize kinship by marriage.  The group recognizes this woman as my wife and these children as my children.  It can also recognize my wife’s brother as my brother-in-law. 

Affinal kinship extends the recognized relations beyond the bounds of blood ties.  This allows the unions that extend Aristotle’s clans into villages and then into the polis fully realized.  So now we get this history:

1.       Solitary animals

2.      Simple political animals

3.      Nuclear families

4.      The polis

With the simplest political community, you would have no families.  Without families, you would have no more that the simplest political community.  No political philosophy that ignores the dynamic by prioritizing one over is sustainable.