On the human thing

I am about to propose a paper for the IPSA next year in Istanbul.  What follows are some reflections that I will distil into that proposal.  

Aristotle reflected that the various branches of philosophy often took their essential subject matter for granted.  A mathematician might never bother to ask what a number is and someone investigating physics (all motion and change, as the philosopher understood it) might never address the question whether motion and change are real.  Modern philosophy, having divorced itself from science, is almost exclusively devoted to topics which other fields take for granted. 

In the case of political science, someone studying voting behavior, for example, will probably feel little need to explain what government is and what politics is, let alone what human beings are.  Political philosophy, my racket, can and must address these questions. 

Politics in its full expression is an exclusively human activity and if the human being is the political animal, as Aristotle says, we cannot understand either the human or the political apart from one another. 

I have long thought the beginnings of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics offer a clue to this puzzle.  Here is how the former opens:

πᾶσα τέχνη καὶ πᾶσα μέθοδος, ὁμοίως δὲ πρᾶξίς τε καὶ προαίρεσις, ἀγαθοῦ τινὸς ἐφίεσθαι δοκεῖ: διὸ καλῶς ἀπεφήναντο τἀγαθόν, οὗ πάντ᾽ ἐφίεται.

Every technology and every methodical inquiry, and similarly both practice and deliberate action, are regarded as aiming at some good; wherefore the good beautifully presents as that at which everything aims. 

I often ask my students in ancient political philosophy to tell me what “the good” is.  They are always stumped.  Aristotle makes it clear.  The good is some goal that explains some deliberate human activity. 

It is important to note that these activities‑technique, method, practice, and action‑are activities of individual persons.  In the most primary sense, politicians politic and deliberate; regimes do so only in a secondary if not a metaphorical sense.  If we take the Nicomachean Ethics to be an account of the human being, and it is certainly at least that, then it would seem that the human being is the natural person, the individual. 

Here is how the Politics begins:

ἐπειδὴ πᾶσαν πόλιν ὁρῶμεν κοινωνίαν τινὰ οὖσαν καὶ πᾶσαν κοινωνίαν ἀγαθοῦ τινος ἕνεκεν συνεστηκυῖαν （τοῦ γὰρ εἶναι δοκοῦντος ἀγαθοῦ χάριν πάντα πράττουσι πάντες）, δῆλον ὡς πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγαθοῦ τινος στοχάζονται, μάλιστα δὲ [5] καὶ τοῦ κυριωτάτου πάντων ἡ πασῶν κυριωτάτη καὶ πάσας περιέχουσα τὰς ἄλλας.  αὕτη δ᾽ ἐστὶν ἡ καλουμένη πόλις καὶ ἡ κοινωνία ἡ πολιτική.

Since we see every polis to be some community and every community is established for the sake of some good (for the good is regarded to be that for the sake of which everyone does everything) as it is clear that as all communities aim at some good, the one that aims especially at the most authoritative good is the most authoritative of all of them and embraces all the others.  This is called the polis, is the political community. 

If the Politics is an account of the human being, and it is surely at least that, then it would seem that the human being is the assembly of natural persons, self-organized in a political way. 

The two points of departure point to one idea.  The human being is not the individual nor is it the social group; it is instead the dynamic that involves both of them.  A person can live apart from other persons, as do hermits; however, to the extent that he lives off the culture baggage that he carries (does he take books with him into the woods?) he is not really alone and to the extent that he does not the life he lives is more animal than human.  If you don’t believe me, read Rousseau’s Second Discourse. 

Likewise, human beings can attempt to integrate themselves and others into a social whole so completely that their individuality disappears.  This latter trajectory is more limited than the former.  It is possible for one human being to become completely feral; it is not possible (at least not yet) for two or more human animals to become one human being.  Only the most awesome force can suppress human individuality and that only so long and so thoroughly as the force is applied.

Biopolitical theory, based on Darwinian evolution, can turn the two dimensional spectrum defined by the poles of human persons and human communities into a three dimensional and very real structure reaching backward into time.  Evolution is not goal-directed.  In so far as it has a direction, it teleomatic rather than teleonomic.  It is a mechanical force, pushing organic forms into new environmental niches.  It is not trying to do anything anymore than a balloon is trying to get high.  At any one point in time a biological lineage can branch toward simpler organisms or more complex ones or both.  That one or more branches moved into new niches by the emergence of more and more complex organisms is the reason that human beings (and bovine beings and canine beings, etc.) exist on this planet. 

Single celled organisms can combine into multicellular organisms and eventually their individuality can be entirely (or almost entirely) submerged into the whole.  Multicellular organisms can go the other way or parts of them can go their own way (viruses?).  Some, as the scarecrow says, do go both ways, as in the case of slime molds.  Multicellular individual organisms can also coalesce with other individuals into larger social wholes, though here complete assimilation is more challenging.  Eusocial insects combine into colonies and hives that act more or less like biological individuals.  A sterile cast of ant workers is a sign that individuality has been reproductively submerged in a social whole.  For the most part, social animals are more individual than social.  Sociobiology is all about the ways that individual interests are managed in a way that maintains social integration. 

Human beings are capable of a degree of social integration that is greater than anything other than the eusocial insects and is much deeper than that.  We are almost certainly the only animal that can try to submerge its individual self in a larger whole, only to fail.  I propose that this is the temporal dimension of Aristotle’s great dichotomy.  I also suspect that group selection is the key to understanding this existential dimension of the human being.  That is what I will present in Istanbul, if my paper is accepted.  

Larry Arnhart's Biopolitical Philosophy

In the essay “On Classical Political Philosophy?” Leo Strauss distinguished between the definite activities of the political philosopher, the legislator, and the statesman, in the following way. 

“Political science” as the skill of the excellent politician or statesman consists in the right handling of individual situations; its immediate “products” are commands or decrees or advices effectively expressed, which are intended to cope with the individual case.  Political life knows, however, a still higher kind of political understanding, which is concerned not with individual cases but, as regards each relevant subject, with all cases, and whose immediate “products”‑laws and institutions‑are meant to be permanent...

Every legislator is primarily concerned with the individual community for which he legislates, but he has to raise certain questions which regard all legislation.  These most fundamental and most universal political questions are naturally fit to be made the subject of the most “architectonic,” the truly “architectonic” political knowledge: of that political science which is the goal of the political philosopher. 

I still remember the wonder with which I first encountered this progression from the immediate, to the long term, to the universal.  It came to mind when I read the following conclusion to Larry Arnhart’s essay: “The Grandeur of Biopolitical Science.” 

Biopolitical science would thus explain politics as the joint product of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual judgments. The natural propensities as shaped in the genetic evolution of political animals constrain but do not determine the cultural traditions of politics. These natural propensities and cultural traditions constrain but do not determine the practical judgments of political actors about what should be done in particular cases, as in Lincoln’s decision about the Emancipation Proclamation. 

To explain this complex interaction of nature, culture, and judgment, biopolitical science would draw knowledge from all fields of traditional political science and from intellectual disciplines across the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

There is grandeur in this view of political life, as originating through the laws of nature for the emergence of irreducibly complex wholes from the cooperation of simple parts, so that, from ants and bees to chimps and humans, endless forms of political order most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The emphasis is mine.  This essay comes from the June 2013 issue of Perspectives on Politics.  It is one of a series of responses to John R. Hibbing’s article: “Ten Misconceptions Concerning Neurobiology and Politics.” 

The emphasized words constitute one of the most concise and powerful arguments for biopolitical science and, one may go farther here, biopolitical philosophy.  This is evident in the comparison between Strauss’s political philosophy, legislation and statesmanship, and Arnhart’s “natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual judgments.”  The objects of political philosophy are the political things in the broadest possible sense: those that do not change or change the least with place and time.  Culture traditions are the products of more or less conscious legislation, as the Greek word nomoi indicates.  Finally, statesmanship is only a special case of individual action, which every citizen necessary participates in. 

The point in Arnhart’s statement is that while nature constrains both culture and individual action, it leaves open a space within which both communities and individuals are able to move, innovate, and make deliberate choices.  That addresses one of the most common objections to biopolitical science: that it amounts to determinism. 

I would add three points here.  One is that nature constrains culture and individual action in two ways.  One is that it limits what is possible.  Someone who believes that she can survive without consuming physical nutrients is mistaken, and no amount of faith or spiritual awareness will supply this limitation. 

Another way that nature constrains the human action is that it limits what is desirable.  It is possible for a person to live the solitary life of a hermit, since hermits occasionally do it; however, human beings being social animals, such a life will never be desirable for most of us. 

The second point is that nature constrains individuals in two ways that can, for some purposes, be distinguished.  Human beings are mammals and mammalian nature is a broad universal.  Individual human beings are also individuals and individuals vary not only by environment but also by biological inheritance.  John Hibbing’s work presents powerful evidence for the inheritance of a wide range of character traits that were, not long ago, assumed to be entirely acquired. 

My last point is that causation works both ways.  Christopher Boehm argues (Cross-Cultural Research, November 2008, 319-352) that

Purposive social selection at the level of phenotype can have parallel effects at the level of the genotype, and that social control has shaped human genetic nature profoundly.

In other words, human cultures, operating within that free space that our natural propensities allow, can bring selection pressure to bear that is sufficient to change those natural propensities.  Boehm begins by reference to the fact that Serbian mountain pastoralists are the tallest “Caucasians” in the world.  He argues that this is in part because of a cultural preference for taller women.  This example, if it holds up, suggests that more or less conscious social selection (the Serbs presumably didn’t know they were breeding for stature) can act relatively quickly.

Boehm’s central target is the evolution of human morality.  He thinks that our capacity for altruism and (my terms) our pallet of moral emotions are the result of selection pressure that originated in the free action of individuals, living in small groups, and over time acting more and more collectively.  I think he is right.  

Boehm's Moral Origins

There is a fine review of Christopher Boehm’s recent book at the Evolutionary Psychology site.  The book is Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame.  The review is by Dennis L. Krebs and Kaleda K. Denton. 

I have the heavy version on the book on my desk.  It is third on my reading list right now.  To judge by the review, it will be a very interesting read.  Here is the reviewers’ synopsis:

Boehm seeks to trace the origins of morality in the human species back to the very beginning. He begins by identifying traits shared by chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans (and going back further, by gorillas) under the assumption that these species probably inherited such shared traits from a common ancestor. 

He goes on to employ findings from archeological research and from ethnographic accounts of contemporary hunters and gatherers to draw inferences about culturally-universal aspects of the social behavior of early humans who lived in the late Pleistocene era, about 45,000 years ago. 

Then, moving to an explanatory level of analysis, Boehm uses evolutionary theory to develop “working hypotheses” that account for the differences between archaic humans and humans who lived in the Pleistocene era. Finally, Boehm notes differences between the social behaviors of modern humans and the social behaviors of hunters and gatherers, and offers a brief explanation for these differences.

I am not sure about that “very beginning” language, but the general strategy seems right.  Why do I and my brother have hands?  Because our father had hands.  Why do I and a chimpanzee share a capacity to be socialized by the group we are raised in?  Because a common ancestor of both of us had trait.  Why did I “pair-bond”, i.e., marry for life, whereas chimpanzees do not?  Because at some point human and chimpanzee evolution diverged.  Figuring out how and why that divergence occurred goes a long way toward explaining the evolution of morality. 

Boehm’s most important argument, which he has been elaborating for some time, is described by Krebs and Denton in these terms:

Central in Boehm’s analysis is the inference that the social order of archaic human groups was hierarchical, dominated by Alpha males. Dominant members of groups are relatively well equipped to induce subordinate members to obey the rules, but this method of social control inevitably gives rise to a significant social problem, namely, how to induce the dominant members of groups to resist the temptation to bully subordinate members of the group and to hog all the resources for themselves.

Boehm suggests that in response to this problem, mechanisms evolved in subordinate members of groups to constrain the domineering behavior of Alpha males. Power comes from numbers. As in living primate groups, subordinate members of archaic human groups formed coalitions that enabled them to gang up on Alpha males to reduce their power and access to resources.

In other words, human evolution produced two traits that are at odds.  One was the dominance and submission schema that is familiar to anyone who is the least bit familiar with chimpanzees.  Alpha males dominate the group, which makes for political order but allows the dominant individual to take unfair advantage and bully pretty much everyone.  The other is the tendency of the subordinate members to resist that domination. 

Boehm believes that early human communities were largely egalitarian because the group resistance to the power of dominant individuals was sufficient to limit that power.  That is a plausible and very interesting thesis.  Whether it is true or not, remains to be seen.  It certainly gives a lot of material for any Biopolitical theory to work on.  To state the obvious, limited government appears as a highly refined expression of the politics that played out in the simplest human communities.  That is worth chewing on.  

 ps.  Doesn't Boehm look smashing under that hat?