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. 

There Are Only Two Cultures

That’s right.  There are only two cultures.  Advocates of multiculturalism and cultural diversity suppose that there are a vast number of cultures but often end up with only two that matter: the dominant, oppressive culture and the oppressed culture to be named later.  That has the effect of compressing all the “others” into one undifferentiated mass. 

I first noticed this when I attended a conference on Ethnic Studies some years ago.  At one panel the chair rose to inform us all of the importance of listening to diverse cultural voices.  He was followed by a Native American scholar, who was followed by an African American scholar and then an Asian American scholar.  Each of them told exactly the same story about coming from a close knit cultural group and being exposed to pressure from the larger cultural at some university.  Each was an interesting, compelling story.  I found myself wanting to sit down to drinks with each of the speakers.  What I didn’t find in their stories was diversity. 

I have always enjoyed literature that plunges me into a world that I cannot otherwise share.  Sherman Alexie’s wonderful stories put me into life on and off the reservation, Junot Díaz has me follow love and loss from the point of view of a Dominican American uber-male.  Isaac Bashevis Singer nourished my soul with tales of Jews in old Europe and New York.  These literatures are treasures beyond price.  They are, however, the stories of the same animal in different circumstances created by the astonishing power of human story telling. 

The problem with arguing that there are many cultures is that there is no non-arbitrary way to distinguish between one culture and another in order to count them.  Is there one “Native American Culture”?  One thing I have learned from my Native American students is that the culture of one tribe is not the same as that of another and that cultural differences emerge even within tribes.  Likewise, Cuban culture is not the same as Dominican culture, let alone Honduran culture.  I learned that from watching Dexter. 

Just as the divisions keep on going downward, all the way perhaps to a single dinner table, so the mixing goes upward.  Are Cuban three generations in Miami the same culturally as Cubans born and bred in Havana?  My friend Ms. Patel from India married Mr. Guthrie from Scotland.  What is the culture of their children? 

If you want to know how many cultures there are, you need some non-arbitrary way to make distinctions.  The oppressor/oppressed distinction is one attempt to do so, but I think it fails in two ways.  One is that it is hard to tell who’s on first.  The New York Irish were on bottom once, then they were on top, and now?  The real power structures in New York may have little to do with what we call ethnic culture. 

The second problem is that this distinction allows the oppressor to define the oppressed.  What does it mean to be an Irish Catholic?  You might suppose it has something to do with the Latin Mass, but you’d be wrong.  For centuries it meant that you were the ones whose land was taken away by the English, who wouldn’t begrudge you the steam off their piss. 

There is a way to distinguish two very distinct cultures.  I first began to grasp it when I read Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel Things Fall Apart.  The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a tribal leader in a fictional Nigerian village.  We see him before and after his native culture is exposed to, and begins to degenerate in the face of, colonial influences.  This presents in stark terms the collision between the only two cultures that there are.  It is not the fact that the missionaries were oppressors that made them distinct in culture; it was the nature of the distinction that made the one oppressors and the other the oppressed. 

Originally there was only one culture.  It was always centered at some here among some us.  We are the people.  Here is the place.  Everywhere else is out there.  Everyone else is them.  The ancient Greek word for stranger (Xenos) also meant enemy.  It’s us or them.  Our temple is the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom; the history of our people is the history of the world.  This culture, which we may call unipolar, has its own logic.  It goes like this:

Why are these ways the best ways? 
Because they are our ways. 
Why are they our ways? 
Because they are the best ways. 

If that strikes you as circular reasoning it strikes you right.  That is its awesome strength.  In this circle, a human soul can come to rest.  All questions are answered by the stories told by the elders.  The circular reasoning at the heart of unipolar culture discourages questioning.  It doesn’t matter if one sacred story contradicts another, say if one story says that human beings were created before the beasts of the field and the other says that they were created after the beasts.  Each story is true in its telling. 

Unipolar culture is not primitive, except in a purely temporal sense.  It probably required more brain power to manage as many stories as possible and to learn the ways of different things without looking for simplifying principles.  As Leo Strauss observed, one needs to learn that the way of dogs is to bark and the way of women is to menstruate and the way of the people to the north is to burn their dead.  Since the human brain is not unlimited in its capacity, the chief editing device was forgetting.  Over time we forget that hero A and hero B were different people and so hero Abe rises in status. 

How a different culture emerged is not entirely mysterious.  Trade was probably the most important driving force.  It was possible for one people to trade with another without regarding the relationship as essentially from the encounters with herds and the flowering of fruit trees in their season.  At some point, however, it occurred to someone that just as we see the world from here, they see it from there and our there is their here.  Their ways are theirs because they are theirs and ours or ours because they are ours.  When in Rome…

Multipolar culture probably emerges in a lot of different places at different times but it becomes fully conscious first (so far as we know) in ancient Greece.  Herodotus’ magnificent history is the best document of its emergence.  Herodotus recognized that no matter where you go, there you are.  He listened to a wide range of stories told by different peoples and understood that there were just their stories.  When possible, he went to check out what he could see for himself.  The sphinx was carved by the gods?  Okay.  But I notice it has chisel marks.  Do the gods use chisels? 

It was Socrates who used his own chisel to cleave the circular logic of the original culture. 

Why does God forbid murder? 
Because it’s wrong. 
Why is it wrong?
Because God forbids it.

That is unipolar thinking.  Socrates spits it open by simply asking:

Is it wrong because God forbids it,
Or Does God forbid it because it is wrong?

If you answer the question one way, you must go on to investigate why God forbids murder.  Because human life is valuable?  Because murder is socially disruptive?  That way leads where Socrates is pointing: toward philosophy. 

If you answer the question the other way, you hold to God’s command by an act of will (or, one might say, surrender).  Only now you know something that the unipolar culture did not.  You know what you are doing.  You know that the law is not something “we” do the way flowers turn towards the sun.  It is something you do when you are refusing to turn the way other things and other people turn. 

Either you view the world from a single center, with a set of ways that define you and set everyone else apart as other, Xenos, or you recognize that there are lots of points of view from which to see the world and other peoples are maintaining their ways as best they can just as you are.  These are the only two cultures available for human beings.

The one, however and however unfortunately, withers when exposed to the other.  That was the lesson of Things Fall Apart.  A better example, perhaps, is Paul Bowles short story, “Here to Learn.”  A young Moroccan woman is cast out of her family because she is raped.  No, it doesn’t matter in that culture that it wasn’t her fault.  Through a series of misadventures, she ends up in Europe married to an American (if I remember correctly) who promptly dies leaving her a rich widow.  Her plight is made difficult by the fact that she doesn’t know what planet she is on.  She knows nothing about the world, that is round, that Europe is north of Morocco.  Having wealth now, she hires someone to teach her about all this.  She learns. 

She resolves to return home to show her family how wealthy she is.  Wealth is one thing that they respected.  When she gets there, the old neighborhood is gone.  There is no trace of it, the houses or the people. 

I am sorry that I just spoiled the ending, but I did so with ruthless purpose: to illustrate my point.  She was born into one of the only two cultures.  She left it.  She can never go back. 

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.  

The Natural Origin of Moral Cultures

In ancient Greek philosophy the most important dichotomy involved phusis and nomos, nature and convention.  Phusis, which is the root of our word for physics, means growth.  A phuton, or “a growth” was the Greek word for a flower or tree or something else that grew out of the soil.  It is interesting that our word “plant” names such an organism by reference to the act of putting it in the ground whereas the Greek word points to the process that defines the organism.  I will leave it to the students of Martin Heidegger to run with that one.  It is enough to say that phusis is the inner nature of anything, what makes it present itself and behave as it does, prior to any human interpretation. 

Nomos originally meant an enclosed pasture, within which animals were allowed to roam free.  The Greeks used the word metaphorically to indicate the written and unwritten laws that govern human social intercourse.  Human beings corral themselves by drawing their wagons into a circle.  The corral is merely a set of agreements or conventions made by particular communities.  We bury our dead.  They burn theirs.  We drink alcohol.  They eat pork.  Just as the pasture is enclosed by an artificial barrier, so the nomoi are human-made.  The nomoi exist by agreement or convention. 

Phusis is the same everywhere and always.  Fire always reaches toward the sky, whether in ancient Athens or today in Aberdeen, South Dakota.  Nomoi vary both between communities and within the same community over time.  For the Greek philosophers, phusis was existentially superior to nomos.  Philosophy was the attempt to replace opinions about the whole of things with knowledge.  If you properly understand something that never changes, you will never be wrong about it.  This kind of understanding is possible (at least in principle) regarding the natural things.  It is not possible even in principle to know something that is valid only by convention.  What is true by convention is worth knowing for practical reasons but uninteresting for theoretical reasons. 

Two corrections regarding the classical view are necessary in light of the modern science of phusis, which today we call biology.  First, natural things are more subject to change than the ancients had supposed.  Both modern biology and even modern physics are evolutionary sciences.  Second, it is no longer possible to view nomos and phusis as mutually exclusive explanations for human behavior.  The creation of norms and other conventions is something that human beings do by nature.  Thus nomoi are as much an expression of human nature and as revealing as the fact that we huddle around a fire when it gets cold. 

One of the things that led me to rethink this is the marvelous article by Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish: “Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality.”  (Annual Review of Psychology, 2013, 64: 231-255).  Tomasello and his large collection of partners work both with apes and young children in order to understand human nature and how it is both very similar and very different from our near Darwinian relatives.  This bit (p. 246-247) jumped out at me:

Further evidence for young children’s understanding of the basic workings of social norms is provided by their selective enforcement of different types of social norms depending on group membership. Thus, children not only distinguish moral from conventional norms on multiple levels (see, e.g., Turiel 2006), but they also enforce the two distinctly.

In particular, when 3-year-old children see a moral norm being broken by an in-group member and an out-group member (as determined by their accents), they protest equivalently. But when they see a conventional norm being broken by these same agents, they protest more against an in-group member than an out-group member (Schmidt et al. 2011).

In this way as well, then, 3-year-olds have a sense of the conventional nature of conventional norms, that is, that these norms have been decided on by, and thus apply only to, one’s own group but that members of other groups may not be aware of or need not follow the same conventions. The same is not true of moral norms involving harm, toward which they take a more universalist approach.

According to this research, 3-year-old children are capable of distinguishing between conventional right (rules of conduct that are valid only because our group has agreed to them) and natural right (rules of conduct that are valid across all human associations).  Assuming that the children in the study are not students of political theory and have not been carefully coached by grad student parents, they seem to have an instinct grasp of the difference between nomoi and phusis.  They instinctively understand the difference between rules that are valid because we agreed on them and thus valid only for those who are part of the agreement and rules that bind everyone. 

If this holds up, it is dynamite for political philosophy.  It means that culture and nature are not in opposition, as social and political theory have supposed since the early moderns.  Culture, or social construction, is not something that takes place in some realm isolated or at least insulated from nature.  Instead, culture is a subcategory of nature.  Fish swim, dogs pee on fire hydrants, and human beings make table manners.  This gives full weight to the conventional nature of conventional norms and at the same time allows us to recognize universal standards by which those norms may be judged.  It makes it possible to respect and tolerate culture differences but also satisfies an apparently natural human yearning to know that some things are simply right and others wrong.