Evolutionary pseudo-psychology (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is competition, leadership, aggression, possessiveness, and social and sexual inequality inevitable? Are they part of our biologically-determined human nature?

Socialists have seen it all before. First it was the Social Darwinists, then it was the Nazis, then in the 1960s books appeared with such titles as The Territorial Imperative, On Aggression and The Naked Ape, then there was sociobiology, now there’s “evolutionary psychology”. All put over the same basic message: competition, leadership, aggression, possessiveness, social and sexual inequality are inevitable; you can never have a society without them as they’re part of biologically-determined human nature.

In reply, socialists have pointed out that the people concerned were not writing as competent scientists but as ideologists serving privileged interests and/or pandering to popular prejudice. In fact the real scientific evidence proved the opposite: humans were of course the product of biological evolution but their particular evolutionary inheritance in the form of a complex brain allowed them to learn and live out a great variety of different behaviour patterns; one key feature of human biological nature was precisely this capacity for flexible behaviour, the capacity to adapt human behaviour to cope with the challenges presented by the natural and the social environments which humans had to live in. Humans can be competitive, aggressive, possessive, etc but we can also be—and are—co-operative, friendly and sharing. Groups of humans have lived in conditions of social equality in the past and so could do so again.

The basic position of the so-called evolutionary psychologists is put by one of their gurus, Steven Pinker, in his book, How The Mind Works:

“For ninety-nine percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic herds. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilisations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, government, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience”

If this figure of 99 percent is meant to be taken literally, and assuming that human societies practising agriculture first came into being 10,000 years ago, the “people” Pinker is talking about would be those living about 1 million years ago. These were certainly members of the genus homo, but of the long-extinct species homo erectus rather than our own species homo sapiens. In fact modern humans are generally regarded as not having evolved until some 100,000 or perhaps 150,000 years ago.

The argument is not that the human brain is not a biological adaptation that better fitted humans for surviving, but whether this adaptation was just best for living as foragers on the African savannah or whether it was a more general capacity to adjust to whatever environment humans found themselves living in.

The fact that even homo erectus left Africa to settle and survive in different environments suggests the latter. This is strengthened by the fact that the evolutionary psychologists have failed to come up with any credible theory as to how complicated behaviour patterns such as they speak of could be governed by genes. For that’s what their argument amounts to—that the behaviour pattern appropriate to a foraging life on the African savannah somehow got imprinted on the brains of the species that immediately preceded us and which we modern humans have inherited through our (and their) genes. In fact, it amounts to a revival, with regard to mental characteristics, of the long-discredited theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited.

As a number of contributors to Alas, Poor Darwin. Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (ed. Hilary and Steven Rose, Jonathan Cape) show, this is not how the brain works. It has long been known that the 18th century materialist view such as that of Robert Owen of the mind as a blank sheet on which the environment can imprint anything is wrong; the brain plays a much more active role in the learning process. We also know, thanks to recent advances in genetics and neuroscience, that some capacities (such as the ability to distinguish faces or to tell distance and perspective) correspond to certain parts of the brain. It is this that the evolutionary psychologists—and others who believe that complex behaviour patterns are innate and that there is, for instance, a gene for aggression or for homosexuality—latch on to, but what they ignore is that the brain is not fully “wired up” (to use one of their favourite metaphors) at birth but that this “wiring up” is a process that takes place as we grow up and learn and in fact continues throughout our lives. We are not born with pre-programmed patterns of behaviour. We learn how to behave after we are born (indeed, this starts while we are still in the womb) and in so doing “programme” or “wire up”, or whatever metaphor you want to use, our brains. We are animals that are capable of adopting a great variety of behaviour patterns. The nature of our brain allows us, as participants in a particular system of society, to “programme” ourselves, in ways that neuroscience is beginning to understand in more detail, for living in that society.

This means that it is just as natural for us humans to live in a society with written language, formal social institutions and high technology as on the African savannah. If Pinker and his followers really believe that they are better adapted genetically to living on the African savannah than in contemporary capitalism or future socialist society then there is an easy way to test this: dump them naked in East Africa and see whether or not the “basic instincts” they suppose themselves to have allow them to survive better there than in Boston or Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, Alas, Poor Darwin cannot be recommended as a fully effective presentation of the case against evolutionary psychology. Some of the contributors do set out cogently enough the points made in the previous paragraphs but, unfortunately, some of the other “arguments against evolutionary psychology” are trivial or wrong. For instance, the first contributor merely criticises the form in which evolutionary psychologists present their arguments while the second (a raving postmodernist) criticises not just biological determinism but all determinisms including therefore social determinisms such as the materialist conception of history. Even Steven Rose himself questions the reasonable assumption—in fact the only reasonable assumption of evolutionary psychology—that humans won’t have changed genetically since we modern humans first evolved some 100,000 years ago. And a contribution from a physical anthropologist is a glaring omission.. Someone like Richard Leakey could have delivered a knock-out blow against the evolutionary psychologists in the first round.

Adam Buick

Hunting, Gathering and Co-operating (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is a change in the basis of society from one of minority class ownership to one of common ownership against human nature?

Are human beings naturally lazy, aggressive, hostile to one another? Or are we by nature friendly and co-operative, ready to help others when they are in trouble and share what we have with them? Or alternatively, does it make little or no sense to say that we are anything very specific “by nature”, since the society and culture we live in play a great part in determining how we behave? Questions like these have been around for centuries, and they are important for the socialist case, for if people are bound to behave aggressively and take more than their fair share, then a socialist society, based on equality and co-operation, is presumably impossible.

The questions we raised above are part of the debate on human nature. One recent academic contribution to these issues is the theory of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to apply Darwin’s way of explaining biological evolution to human behaviour and psychology. Darwin’s theory of natural selection explains how organisms change by adapting to their environment and so becoming more fitted to survive and reproduce. Evolutionary psychology uses the same kinds of arguments in attempting to account for human behaviour and the nature of the human mind which underlies this behaviour. In the words of leading evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works:

“The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules’ basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history.”

This, to take one of Pinker’s own examples, according to evolutionary psychology our disgust at unpleasant food is not due to any innate dislike for particular tastes. Rather, it would be an adaptation that emerged as a safety device: we don’t eat things unless we are pretty sure that they are unlikely to harm us; thus we stand a good chance of avoiding foodstuffs that may well be poisonous—an invaluable trait in a world where humans relied on hunting and gathering but were surrounded by masses of potentially toxic plants and animals.

Hunting and gathering (sometimes known as foraging) is the way that humans lived for 90 percent of our species’ time on earth. People lived in smallish tribes, moving frequently from place to place, gathering wild plants and hunting animals. Money did not exist, nor did any form of government, and there was no distinction between rich and poor. The rise of settled agriculture about ten thousand years ago put an end to hunting-gathering communities in most parts of the world, though some are still just about surviving nowadays.

A lot would seem to rest, then, if the evolutionary psychologists are right, on the nature of hunting-gathering society: if it was essentially peaceful and based on sharing, then the human brain and mind would have evolved to fit in with a peaceful way of doing things, whereas if hunter-gatherers were often violent, then (on the evolutionary psychologists’ view, anyway) our minds are adapted to survive in a violent world. Let’s quote Pinker again, as he makes the political issues here quite explicit:

“One of the fondest beliefs of many intellectuals is that there are cultures out there where everybody shares freely. Marx and Engels thought that preliterate peoples represented a first stage in the evolution of civilization called primitive communism, whose maxim was ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ . . .

Foraging peoples, to be sure, really do share with non-relatives, but not out of indiscriminate largesse or a commitment to socialist principles. The data from anthropology show that sharing is driven by cost-benefit analyses and a careful mental ledger for reciprocation. People share when it would be suicidal not to . . . warfare itself is a major fact of life for foraging tribes. Many intellectuals believe that primitive warfare is rare, mild and ritualized, or at least was so until the noble savages were contaminated by contact with Westerners. But this is romantic nonsense. War has always been hell.”

Most work in evolutionary psychology takes a similar view, that hunting-gathering society was built around—or at least marked by—power and aggression, and that therefore the human mind has evolved along lines designed to enable us to cope with power and aggression.

More recently, however, an alternative has begun to emerge within evolutionary psychology itself. Andrew Whiten of St Andrews University has argued that egalitarianism, sharing and lack of domination were the most prominent features in hunter-gatherer societies, and that it is this is that lies behind human psychological evolution. In papers such as “The evolution of deep social mind in humans” and “Egalitarianism and Machiavellian intelligence in human evolution” (the latter co-written with David Erdal) he has presented a very different picture from that offered by most evolutionary psychologists. At a recent conference in Edinburgh, Whiten argued that our ancestors evolved through sharing and co-operation in line with socialist ideals, a claim that was even noticed in the press (Times, 19 August). Let’s look a little more closely at his ideas.

Examination of a wide range of studies of present-day hunter-gatherers shows that they share food, especially meat, and that this sharing takes place even when food is scarce. This sharing, Erdal and Whiten argue, occurs because it reduces the risk for all individuals, enabling them to get by on unlucky days, secure in the knowledge that some time soon they are likely to be successful in their own hunting. Sharing means that nobody has priority of access to food, and this ties in with the fact that hunter-gatherer societies lack any kind of dominance or rank. There are no permanent leaders, and anyone who has ambitions for dominance is ridiculed or ostracised. Co-operation extends beyond food-sharing and countering would-be chiefs, as it also involves co-ordination, such as the organisation of hunting expeditions and care for the sick.

Non-human primates (chimps and gorillas) do have dominance hierarchies, so the human capacity for egalitarianism is an evolutionary innovation. According to Whiten possibly people who put time and effort into trying to dominate others found they had less time to devote to foraging and enjoyable leisure pursuits, so the would-be leaders discovered that they were living less well than their more co-operative colleagues. This last part is speculative, but it does help to emphasise the point that humans are different from our closest non-human relatives, so that it is quite invalid to argue that whatever holds for chimps must be valid for people too.

So what does Whiten’s work have to say about the prospects for socialism? The answer is: not necessarily very much. It would be nice if we could conclude that human characteristics, as they have evolved over the millennia, have made us “naturally” egalitarian and co-operative. But what matters is not whether people are naturally like this or not. More important is whether our behaviour, influenced as it is not just by our evolutionary heritage but also by the social conditions we live in and our cultural response to these conditions, can fit in with the idea of a co-operative and egalitarian socialist society. Even under capitalism people often share and work together. Hunter-gatherer societies also show that people can live in a co-operative way, without bosses or governments. It might be nice to bolster this by claiming that humans’ long egalitarian heritage means that we are better adapted to sharing than to competing, but this extra, and more speculative, argument is not really essential.

We may conclude that humans are not condemned to be endlessly competitive or selfish, and that socialism is not contrary to human nature.

Paul Bennett

Steven Pinker, the modern Pangloss (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like a fearful angel, you don’t need to tread far into the recent works of Steven Pinker, particularly The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018), to get the gist of his popular thesis that today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better still, so long as states maintain control and reason triumphs over savage instinct. Better Angels is Bill Gates’s favourite book, and it’s not hard to see why.

The appeal is in the sensationally anti-intuitive optimism and the simplicity of the argument. A clear line is drawn from barbaric prehistory through the murderous Middle Ages all the way to the relatively placid present, in a bid to demonstrate the ‘civilising process’ embodied by states, which has led to universally declining levels of violence. Pinker doesn’t claim it’s a new idea, and indeed bases much of his argument on Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, published in Germany in 1939 (a not-insignificant date, as we shall see).

It’s also an idea with some good prima facie evidence supporting it, at least for Western Europe during the last few centuries, at least for average civilian homicide rates. Few historians would argue that murder rates in this part of the world have not declined substantially over that period.

But zoom out, and the price of this simple linear argument seems to be that all other lines and details have been overlooked, rather like a large-scale geographical map from which all roads and features have been erased, apart from the one single highway that Pinker wants you to follow.

Predictably, this has enraged academic historians, who liken Pinker to a visitor who enters your house in muddy boots and then sticks his feet up on your living room table. Now, frustrated by the fact that ‘Pinker’s message is reaching the masses, and ours is not’, many of these historians, some of them from Pinker’s own Harvard University, have joined forces to deliver a devastating counter-blow (The Darker Angels of our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence, edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale, Bloomsbury, 2022). There are 18 chapters written by experts in pre- and medieval history, early modern Russia and Japan, the Enlightenment, the British Empire, and histories of the environment, sexual violence, race, and the myth of a universal human nature. Some contributors offer a cool and detached evaluation of Pinker’s methodology, while others write with barely concealed rage at his blithe effrontery and cavalier lack of scholarship.

Pinker’s approach to evidence is variously described as shoddy, egregious and cherry-picking. He quotes sources that suit his argument, even if they’re only coffee-table books (like The Great Big Book of Horrible Things), and ignores vast swathes of respectable research that don’t. For instance, the medievalist Sara Butler writes: ‘Pinker has never seen a medieval court record, nor does he understand how the law worked in the Middle Ages… When he measures medieval against modern statistics, he has no idea that they are measuring very different things… without valid statistics, Pinker’s entire argument falls apart’ (p136).

If you ever wondered how Pinker could possibly know the murder rates in medieval times, with its patchy records, or in prehistory, with almost no records, you’ll find academic historians asking exactly the same question. Pinker doesn’t know, he’s guessing, and relying on estimates which are themselves sometimes wildly inflated and ideologically suspect, like those of Catholic missionaries estimating the supposed violence of heathen Native Americans. If you as an archaeologist dug up two Iron Age skeletons, and one had had its head bashed in, you wouldn’t automatically conclude that the murder rate must have been 50 percent. Archaeologist Linda Fibiger certainly wouldn’t. She studied 1,000 human remains from 150 sites spanning 3,000 years and made tentative conclusions on interpersonal violence only for that period and only within that geographical range. Pinker makes continent-wide conclusions based on 21 individuals from one Jutland cemetery (p.115).

What we discover, in chapter after chapter, is that Pinker is massaging the evidence, upwards in the case of the past, to make violence and ‘savagery’ look much worse than it really was, and downwards in the present, to make the world seem more peaceful than it really is. To take one example, he cites one claim that the Spanish Inquisition executed 350,000 Jews in 350 years, which was nearly twice the total population of Jews in Spain during that period (p.128). He also name-checks an eminent researcher but without mentioning the researcher’s own estimate of executions for the same period at around 810, a figure widely considered more reliable. This figure generates its own irony, as it would mean that Pinker’s own ‘civilised’ USA, with 1,526 executions between 1973 and today (p.270), has executed almost twice as many people as the Spanish Inquisition, and in a fifth of the time.

In reality, much of the historical evidence suggests the opposite of what Pinker claims. The Middle Ages was not addicted to cruel executions, which were in fact rare, and most punishments were in the form of fines. Early modern Russia, considered ‘uncouth’ by Western standards, executed far fewer people than its neighbouring European countries, and with less Grand Guignol cruelty. The Enlightenment, rather than civilising society, served to justify unparalleled colonial and racist violence, while excluding whole categories including women from supposedly universal notions of human rights. There’s a pattern to all this, and you can easily find other examples yourself. For instance, the ‘Wild West’ was arguably less violent than the modern USA and had more robust gun laws (bit.ly/3wYwj7S).

Pinker is unashamedly a neo-Hobbesean, arguing that in ‘non-state societies’ we humans are ruled by our inner demons – predation, dominance, revenge, sadism and ideology (‘ideology’ here meaning fascism, Marxism etc, but not his own perspective, which doesn’t count), whereas the benevolence of disinterested elites (like himself) and the ‘gentle commerce’ of capitalism have ‘gifted’ us modern civil liberties and allowed the predominance of our ‘better angels’ including empathy, self-control, a moral sense and reason. At no point does he consider that these modern freedoms had to be fought bitterly for, and in fact sees any social dissent or struggle as counter-productive and ‘de-civilising’.

And here is where Elias, a German Jew writing in 1939, becomes relevant again. His theory of states as a civilising influence presupposed that the state itself was benevolent. Elias ended up doubting his own assumption (p.101) precisely because of what subsequently happened in Europe. Yet Pinker skates over all this, dismissing the Holocaust as a statistical outlier that doesn’t affect his main argument. Awkward details don’t trouble him, as he ‘only travels on the sunny side of the street’ (p.66), trading in ‘comfort history’ and ‘Pinkering’ the evidence (p.305). Though Better Angels, at 800 pages, seems to follow the principle that ‘if you say it enough, it becomes true’ (p.176), Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil – Sparta to Darfur (2007) concludes, in 700 pages, that genocidal violence is as bad today as it’s ever been (p.332). With Pinker, one is irresistibly reminded of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, for whom everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Finally, modern historians are suspicious of linear historical narratives, because linearity always involves leaving stuff out. Nowadays they prefer more ‘webby’ approaches which reflect the diverse and often contradictory nature of the evidence. Marx the dialectician would have approved of this approach, so it’s a shame that one or two contributors in this book see him as part of the problem, a linear teleological thinker plotting a deterministic path to the future. This is to take the same one-sided view of Marx that Pinker takes of history. In all probability, judging from the withering scorn that Marx levelled at the half-baked and self-serving bourgeois thinkers of his own day, he would have given Pinker a roasting that even the sharpest condemnations in this collection would struggle to match.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Is capitalism making us lose our marbles? (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ongoing pandemic is more than a global health emergency, it’s a global mental health emergency, with evidence-based reasoning looking especially battered and bloody. Social media and preference algorithms have in the past decade escalated what were mostly marginal beliefs about pseudo-science, conspiracy theories and vaccine scepticism into what looks like a proliferating mass-psychosis.

Even some Marxists are not immune. A recent email from a French class war group begins ‘Behind the endless statist lie of the Coronavirus, a spectre haunts Europe: the spectre of communism.’ The spectre of Covid paranoia is more like it.

One doesn’t have to dig deep to find the shoddy capitalist motives behind all this. It’s not just would-be demagogues like Trump promoting barking-mad QAnon fantasies to get votes. Online ‘influencers’ have found they can monetise attention by making increasingly outrageous claims that attract shocked followings, thereby earning money from advertisers. Some, like the YouTuber who claims the Roman Empire never existed, will probably remain lone and batty outliers. Others including anti-vaxxers are literally making millions by exploiting people’s fear and suggestibility. Twelve of the richest and most shameless grifters are responsible for 65 percent of vaccine misinformation on all social media and 73 percent on Facebook (bit.ly/33pusOJ). Plenty of others are queuing up to plough this lucrative field.

At least half of the population at any one time believes in one or more conspiracy theories (bit.ly/3I9a2II). Why are humans so vulnerable? Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, currently touting his new book on rationality, thinks we have a natural tendency to tribalism and magical thinking, reined in by civilised society’s apparatus of science, fact checking and peer review (bbc.in/3I6WM7m). This is of a piece with his Hobbesian view that we are basically murderous brutes who need to be kept in line by coercive state regimes. But it’s a bit rich to be lectured on how to think rationally by someone rather obviously operating from his own set of a priori assumptions. As an example, in a recent BBC series on violence, Pinker commits an egregious sleight-of-hand in extrapolating evidence of Neolithic warfare (ie, from property societies of the last 10,000 years) backwards into the vast 300,000-year period of the non-propertied Palaeolithic, where no good evidence for it exists (bbc.in/3rt9K8E). As for science, that didn’t fall on us like a gift from the gods either. We created it ourselves precisely because we don’t need magical thinking, any more than we need police states.

Nonetheless he’s right that rationality is not a natural skill but an artificial one, like literacy and numeracy, and one which needs to be cultivated for the good of our ‘epistemic environment’. But we’re not cultivating it very well, a fact which the monetisers are able to exploit.

They know, for instance, that more than 90 percent of people hold some form of non-rational or delusional belief, from touching wood to wishing people luck. We’re all prone to well-known cognitive foibles such as confirmation, desirability and clustering biases, as well as the common intuitive short-cut of leaping to conclusions to save the slow analytical effort of slogging through evidence (bit.ly/3nsXrIl).

Poverty and low education are obviously fertile soil for an angry distrust of authority, leading to ‘establishment or world-order types of conspiracy’, but conversely, smart people can often be the easiest to fool, because of vanity and ‘a mistaken belief in their own abilities to filter truth from bullshit’ (bit.ly/33hlHGx).

People have a tendency to associate minor events with minor causes, and major events with major causes, a kind of symmetry bias. In one study, a group shown a fictitious story where a presidential assassination attempt failed were willing to believe a lone actor was responsible, but a second group, told the attempt succeeded, were more likely to believe there was a conspiracy behind it (bit.ly/3fpOTh0). If a princess has a car accident, it’s just an accident, but if it’s upsettingly fatal, that explanation feels too small to fill the yawning emotional hunger for cause to fit effect, so non-random explanations are hunted for, the more convoluted the better. Such an emotional need can be weaponised. Thus a global pandemic becomes no longer just an unforeseen catastrophe but an intentional plot to abolish liberty and turn us into zombies.

Biases creep in when we’re not looking. One recent study showed that ‘People share fake news online even when they can tell it’s not true’, but only if the fake news resonates with their own political views. Conversely, they are far less likely to share it if they think it’s true, but not in line with their own beliefs. The study found however that if people are first asked to evaluate a news story, they are much less likely to pass it on if they think it’s false, regardless of their own views, suggesting that we can be more analytical if prompted (bit.ly/3ttRDCm).

Then there is the remarkable fact that if you are simply told a thing, you are less likely to believe it than if you have to solve a puzzle to discover it, so that a cleverly written narrative using fake evidence is more effective if it makes the reader work to unravel the implications (bit.ly/3nrdvdQ).

Fortunately these tricks don’t work on everyone because there are also other mechanisms at work, notably ‘plausibility checking’, which relies on comparing new information to known and reliable sources. This may explain why, for instance, studies show that political campaigns don’t really work in changing the minds of voters, and why Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda had little effect in areas with no history of prejudice (bit.ly/31Y9yFM). Nevertheless, it’s questionable how many people routinely employ plausibility checking given that it runs against the grain of intuitive thinking, in short, it’s more effort.

So the internet is confronting us with a rationality crisis, because there’s money in them thar shills. In one town, fake news is the main industry (cnn.it/3Ab6Vx5). Capitalism could do more to fight this trend, of course, but it has no great interest in us being rational because rational people would get rid of it. It spews myths the way a factory spews smoke, hiding itself inside a cloud of bogus values, bogus facts and bogus scapegoats.

How should socialists answer those who believe in global hoaxes and conspiracies? Patient refutation doesn’t work because their views are built on self-fulfilling logic. Expecting attack, they become adept at defensive attrition, demanding evidence and then ignoring it, changing the subject constantly to keep you off-balance and playing catch-up, knowing it’s all more exhausting for you than it is for them. But despite everything, people often do recover from such cognitive traps, just like they recover from religious delusions. Some deeper reason reasserts itself. All we can do is show empathy for whatever emotional need has driven them into the trap in the first place, and nudge them supportively towards the larger truth, which is that their real enemy is not a thing you can touch or a group of people you can hate, but a simple set of social relationships, ones we have the power to change together.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Parasites Lost (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A curious fact unloved by politicians eager to stoke public paranoia is that serious crime rates have been falling for decades, both in America, Europe and the UK, which despite being Europe’s ‘crime hotspot’ nevertheless is enjoying its lowest murder rate for 12 years.  Murder rates are a particularly good indicator of trends, because they are nearly always reported, and because they are universally counted in the same way (ie by victim rather than by case). Rates for Europe are around 2 murders per hundred thousand of the population, while there are murder sprees in some South American and Caribbean countries.  The rate in Honduras for 2010 was 78 (50 in 2000), El Salvador was 66 (60) and Jamaica 52 (34) (Wikipedia). The higher the rate the more volatile the change seems to be. In general though, in all countries across the world with low murder averages the trend is either stable or declining.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard evolutionary psychologist, is currently doing the rounds with his new book The Better Angels of our Nature which argues that murder rates have been falling in all modern societies since the Middle Ages. The question exercising everyone, assuming that the evidence is correct, is why.

An obvious fact about global social development is a general improvement in material well-being, albeit at vastly different rates, the poorest tending to benefit least. This might perhaps suggest a simple inverse ratio between material security and murder rates, the one going up as the other goes down. Murder rates globally do show that some of the most violent countries are also poor, however a closer look shows that there is no reliable correlation. For example Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world (4th in the table cited below) yet has a murder rate of 6.9, roughly similar to Moldova (position 80) and Estonia (position 102).  The three murder-prone countries cited above (Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica) are in positions 14, 64 and 122 respectively. (LINK). Meanwhile the USA, the richest country in the world, has a higher murder rate than Romania, Turkey, Yemen, Albania, Cuba, Belarus and many others.

A new suggestion comes from Randy Thornhill, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico (New Scientist, 12 November). Dubbed the ‘parasite stress’ model, his idea treats all diseases as parasites on human society, and argues that diseases tend to fragment societies into defensive, family-based micro-units in which xenophobic and autocratic conservative values are the norm.  Thornhill’s study shows a link between high disease rates and high murder rates across different US states even after taking into account local levels of economic inequality.  A separate study shows a link between high murder rates and ‘conservative’ style cultures.  No study has yet combined all three factors . The devil is in the causality though. Do people commit murder because there is a lot of disease about, or are they both functions of something else? If one takes infectious disease as a general indicator, most African countries are at very high risk, whereas their positions in the murder rate tables vary considerably, some being close to the European average.

There is more to be done with this notion of the ‘parasite model’ from a socialist point of view.  In a sense all living organisms are parasitical on something. In nature this parasitism is often driven into competition by population or resource ‘stress’, and can express itself either destructively, neutrally or beneficially to the ‘other party’. Most obviously, the predator can simply wipe out the prey, as Ebola does, or as early humans probably did with extinct large fauna such as woolly mammoth, horses and giant bison.  Often a neutral balance is achieved. In a closed eco-system, the predator and the prey achieve a population equilibrium known as homeostasis. If predators become too numerous, prey will be depleted, which will in turn drag predator numbers back down. A similar corrective pressure exists for prey increases.  The third manifestation of parasitism is symbiosis, where two species ‘learn’ to live off each other in a mutually beneficial arrangement.

All these forms of parasitism exist at every biological level, including bacterial, viral and genetic. At the level of microbiology it is easy to see that ‘killer diseases’ are in fact biologically self-defeating organisms, since they too easily destroy the vehicle for their own reproduction, while the most successful parasites are those which have ‘learned’ not to be deleterious to their hosts, and are in fact beneficial to them. This is the ‘good bacteria’ we hear about in yoghurt adverts, for example.

What holds for microbiology also holds for macrobiology. Socialists often describe capitalists as parasites, because it is literally true. It therefore makes sense to view this relationship in terms of a medical condition. Once they came under competitive population and resource stress, human social organisms, however egalitarian they may have started out, collapsed into hierarchical and parasitical structures.  They became ‘diseased’.

We can show that this ‘disease state’ is actually a disease and not a neutral or beneficial adaptive behaviour pattern. While rabbits and antelope don’t have the mental faculties to get depressed about their status in the scheme of things, there is evidence to show that primates do. Stress produces the hormone cortisol, which furs up the arteries leading to heart disease, while also lowering the immune system. In studies of zoo-kept monkeys, the individuals suffering highest levels of stress and heart disease, with lowest immune systems and serotonin levels, were those at the bottom of the hierarchy.  In a study of 17,000 Whitehall civil servants, low job status was a more reliable indicator of heart disease than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure. A 1960s study of a million workers at Bell Laboratories in the USA found the same thing (Matt Ridley, Genome, Fourth Estate, 1999, p154). Since hierarchies are pyramidal structures with the vast majority at the bottom, we can say that hierarchies per se are generally bad for human health. From this perspective, current human behaviour including murder is better understood as part of a disease pathology.

What do we gain by medicalising society in this way? Much is made of capitalism’s ‘natural’ place in human behaviour, as if that makes it desirable, beneficial and unavoidable – a ‘good thing’. Its defenders forget that disease is natural too. If we incorporate class society into an overall ‘parasite stress’ model of diseases, it is intuitively easier to apprehend capitalism as a natural killer disease like cancer, blind, destructive and out of control, a parasitism gone wrong. We can also begin to liberate ourselves from deterministic ‘human nature’ arguments that try to normalise abnormal behaviour. Most importantly, we can work on a cure, because unlike monkeys and microbes, we have the ingenuity to help ourselves. Scarce resources may have caused the original problem but now technology can solve it. The voracious runaway parasitism of capitalism is not inevitable and can be supplanted by a beneficial symbiosis within and beyond human society.  We can become the planet’s ‘good bacteria’, once we have correctly diagnosed the problem.

Paddy Shannon

A Modern Denial of Pinker (2013)

From the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1999 Steven Pinker threw down the gauntlet with his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature in which he argued that selfish and aggressive human behaviour was hard-wired by the genetically-determined structure of the human brain. Writing as an ideologue and outside his specialist field of how the brain interprets sensations from the eyes, he proclaimed:

‘Those who believe that communism or socialism is the most rational form of social organisation are aghast at the suggestion that they run against our selfish natures.’

Although not written as such, The Marvelous Learning Animal: What Makes Human Nature Unique by Arthur Staats, a retired behavioural psychologist who specialised in child development, published last year by Prometheus Books, is in effect a rebuttal of what Staats calls the ‘Great Scientific Error’ and which Pinker exemplifies.

Staats traces this error back to a speculation by Darwin that human behaviours might also have been inherited by the same process of biological natural selection as the physical features of the human body. Staats argues that there is no validated evidence for this and that, on the contrary, ‘you are what you learn’; at birth the mind of the human child is, yes, a blank slate and its future personality and repertoire of behaviours depends on the way it will be brought up, on what and how it learns. He backs this up with the results of his own and others’ research in the field of child development.

Brain scans

Biological determinists like Pinker rely on findings revealed by brain scans which show that there are some differences in the brain features of, for instance, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, people with personality disorders and people without, and children with autism and other children. The conclusion they draw is that it is these differences in the brain that determine the differences in behaviour.

But hold on, says Staats, this doesn’t necessarily follow; we know that learning must change the brain, so that the brain differences could equally reflect different learning experiences. This, he suggests, is more likely, especially as those who argue that the brain differences are inherited via genes have been unable to identify any gene governing behaviour (the only genes identified have been are ones governing bodily features and defects) or even to explain, if such genes existed, how they would or could influence behaviour. ‘Brain changing does not produce learning; learning produces brain changes.’ Staats accepts that it has not yet been worked out how exactly learning changes the brain and calls for more research into learning.

Learning animal

Part 2 on ‘The Human Animal’ explains how the human body (upright stance, binocular three-dimensional colour vision, vocal system capable of emitting a wide range of sounds, free hands with opposable thumbs, a big brain with a million million neurons), together with a prolonged period of growing up, makes humans a ‘learning animal’:

‘… we have been shaped by evolution to learn extensively. Humans encounter the richest of all learning environments. Systematic consideration indicates that our huge brains have been developed to learn the very complex behaviours needed to adjust to that complex environment. Evolution constructed us to do that according to learning principles. Huge learning ability constitutes an essential, fundamental, deep, extensive, and valuable part of human nature. The human is a learning animal, better than any other, by a huge difference.’

Cumulative learning

The distinguishing feature of human learning, he points out, is that it is ‘cumulative’ with what one generation of humans has learned being passed on to the next generation and extended. Most animals do learn some of their behaviour (more than is often assumed) but it is the same behaviour that is learned unchanged from generation to generation. Hence Staats’ conclusion that:

‘Generally it should not be assumed that the behaviour of any other animal can be studied as a means of knowledge of human behaviour. Humans are different than all other animals in learning.’

So much, then, for Konrad Lorenz, Richard Dawkins and their geese.

With humans, what has been learned can be passed on, by the non-biological means of culture, and has been:

‘There is no evidence of a genetically produced change in the human brain for a hundred or so thousands of years, during which time there have been fantastic advances in culture. This holds that the cultural advances in technology, entertainment, politics, language, economics, education, inventions, and other social features are due to learning. There is no cultural evolution.’

To say that there is ‘no cultural evolution’ may seem odd as there is a sense in which there could be said to have been, but he means that the growth of culture does not take place in the same way as the evolution of the human body did.

Human self-creation

Staats speculates that, in the later stages of the biological evolution towards homo sapiens, learned behaviour must also have played a part and he coins the term ‘the human creation theory’ of origin of humans. Some anthropologists have already come to a similar conclusion and talk of biological-cultural ‘co-evolution’, or that, in the title of one of Gordon Childe’s books, Man Makes Himself.

Staats calls for a paradigm shift away from genetic explanations of human behaviour to learning ones. Actually, until the 1970s, that humans were a ‘culture-bearing animal’ whose behaviour was learned was accepted by most cultural anthropologists. For instance, in his introduction to Man and Aggression (1968) Ashley Montagu wrote:

‘The notable thing about human behaviour is that it is learned. Everything a human being does as such he has had to learn from other human beings. From any dominance of biologically or inherited predetermined reactions that may prevail in the behaviour of other animals, man has moved into a zone of adaptation in which his behaviour is dominated by learned responses. It is within the dimension of culture, the learned, the man-made part of the environment that man grows, develops, and has his being as a behaving organism.’

So what Staats is calling for is not so much a new paradigm as a return to the situation that existed before the biological determinist counter-revolution.

While Pinker reflects the current popular prejudice that human nature is a barrier to socialism, Staats looks forward to a time (which he considers inevitable in the long run, even if gradually)

‘… when there is no race or other prejudice or mistreatment, no war, no exploitation of people by other people, no brutality, equitable abundance for all, and general kindness and compassion.’

Adam Buick 

Angels and Devils (2013)

Book Review from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Better Angels of Our Nature. By Steven Pinker. Penguin £12.99.

This is a real brick of a book (over eight hundred pages of text), but its message can be stated very simply: the extent of violence in society has been declining over many centuries and is still doing so. To support this claim, Pinker cites a mass of historical statistics, and to explain this supposed trend he appeals to both political and psychological factors. The title, by the way, comes from a quote by Abraham Lincoln.

In part this drop in violence involves the drastic reduction or effective elimination of such things as bear-baiting, execution by means of breaking on the wheel, human sacrifice and the most gruesome forms of torture. Murder rates have fallen quite drastically, for instance from 110 per 100,000 people per year in 14th-century England to less than one per 100,000 now. But above all it means a reduction in the number of deaths in war, or, more accurately a cut in the proportion of the population killed in war. The Second World War was responsible for 55 million deaths and was the bloodiest conflict ever. Yet the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-century China was responsible for 36 million dead, and, if scaled up to twentieth-century population figures, this would mean well over 400 million deaths.

It may be reasonable enough to speak in terms, not of absolute numbers of casualties, but of proportions and a person’s chances of being killed. Yet this emphasis on relative figures leads to some bizarre conclusions, especially the view that there was a Long Peace in the second half of the twentieth century: but then, all ‘peace’ under capitalism is relative. In the first decade of the present century, the annual global rate of battle deaths was less than one per 100,000 people. But this figure requires some careful redefinitions, such as saying that most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by subsequent ‘intercommunal violence’ rather than the American invasion itself. Moreover, a nuclear war is by no means out of the question now (see Material World in the January Socialist Standard). Also, it is not just war that needs to be considered: according to the One Billion Rising Campaign, one in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.

As for the causes of war, Pinker claims that countries no longer fight over scarce resources, though he accepts the existence of a ‘resource curse’, whereby less-developed states with plenty of non-renewable resources are often extremely violent. However, the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, currently in dispute between China and Japan, may well have oil reserves, and war there is by no means ruled out. He also treats cases for and against going to war as rational solutions to a problem in game theory, with positive and negative values for the different sides either fighting or not. But this assumes that those who may benefit (the rulers and owners) are the same people as those who are likely to be killed.

Pinker has featured in these pages before (for instance, see our April 2003 issue for a dissection of his views on human nature and his misunderstandings of socialism). And things have not improved much here: he uncritically considers Stalin and Mao as representatives of ‘Marxian socialism’, and there can be no excuse for referring to ‘the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups’.

Paul Bennett

Steven Pinker Clarifies his Opposition to Socialism (2013)

Steven Pinker

From the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Standard: Given your view that socialist communal ownership and cooperation is against human nature, do you see yourself as a latter day Thomas Hobbes, justifying the need for a coercive state apparatus to protect us from ourselves?

Steven Pinker: I don’t think that communal ownership and cooperation are against human nature, period — they are natural among blood relatives, close friends, and tightly knit tribes — but I am indeed skeptical that they are natural among strangers and acquaintances, to say nothing of entire large-scale societies. But yes, I am a Hobbesian, in the sense that I believe the evidence shows that a society with a democratic government, including a police force and judiciary (the coercive apparatus) is vastly less violent than a society living in anarchy. Hobbes himself was squishy about the ‘democratic’ part — he imagined that the state would somehow perfectly embody the interests of the people — and I depart from him in believing that democratic constraints on state power must be an explicit part of the social contract.

Socialist Standard: Your argument that levels of violence were highest among hunter-gatherer societies, thereafter declining to a record low in modern capitalism, has been hotly contested on the grounds that a) the modern primitive communities you cite are not really hunter-gatherers and have in addition had decades of contact with modern capitalism and b) that you have overlooked many large wars and civilian war-related deaths in recent history. Are you simply cherry-picking the evidence to suit your theory?

Steven Pinker: Absolutely not. For one thing, my argument rests on the distinction between anarchic and governed societies, not hunter-gatherers versus the rest. For another, I separate data from hunter-gatherers on the one hand, and hunter-horticulturalists and other tribal groups, on the other; the latter are indeed more violent than the former (on average), but both types of anarchical societies have enormously higher rates of violence than modern ones. Third, many of these estimates come from societies that had little to no contact with Westerners; the archaeological record, and many reports of first encounters with native peoples, indicate that they had high rates of violence well before they made contact with the West. Finally, my data for modern wars come from every independent dataset in the literature that I could find (including those of Quincy Wright, Pitirim Sorokim, L. F. Richardson, the Correlates of War Project, and, for more recent wars, the datasets from the Peace Research Institute of Oslo and the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. It’s possible that they missed some small wars, particularly in earlier periods, but they certainly did not miss any large ones, particularly in recent times. The estimates all include civilian deaths. Some of them stick to violent battle-related deaths (as opposed to indirect deaths from disease or famine), others try to estimate total deaths; the text indicates which is which.

Socialist Standard: To evade the charge of genetic determinism in The Blank Slate you argued that we could tell our genes ‘to go jump in the lake’. Surely, then, you cannot rule out socialist common ownership on genetic grounds?

Steven Pinker: That’s right, not a priori. All modern political systems are artificial, implementing designs that try to allow their citizens to prosper. Yet all of them have to take human nature into account, including the scope of our cooperative instincts, the incentives that drive us, the sources of our pleasure and pain, the differences among us, and the limitations on our powers of reason and decision-making. I suspect that regulated, safety-net capitalism of the form found in, say, today’s Canada and Germany, are likelier to maximize human happiness under these constraints than the forced collectivism of Stalin and Mao. Presumably you have some third alternative in mind; in the absence of details I can’t judge how well it would deal with the constraints imposed by human nature, but I’d argue that its success in bettering people’s lives will depend on how well it deals with them.

(For a review of Pinker’s latest book ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’, see page 20)

Pathfinders: Drinking from the Skulls (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the centenary of the War that didn’t end all wars it was always inevitable that patriotic pundits would be parading across the small screen to explain why the Great War was necessary and why carping critics who say otherwise are plain wrong.

Historian Ian Morris went one better recently by arguing that war has in fact been good for us. Why? Because ‘war made states, and states made peace’ (New Scientist, 23 April).

Setting aside current ungentlemanly excesses in Ukraine, Gaza, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq and other hotspots, Morris describes a historic trend away from war which, by a twist of circular reasoning, he attributes to war itself. So upbeat is he on the theme that he claims ‘war may be so good at delivering peace and wealth in the long run that it finally seems to be putting itself out of business.’

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s based on the Steven Pinker argument about the historic decline in violence (see the Socialist Standard special issue, November 2013), with the difference that it takes the neo-Hobbesian ‘ignoble savage’ thesis that humans must be ruled by strong states and adds a kind of teleological Pangloss to it.  It’s a bit like saying that rape and wife-beating forced societies to make laws protecting women, therefore rape and wife-beating were ultimately good for women.

There is never a shortage of right-wing loonies who, regarding any anti-war statement as pinko propaganda, will argue that war is good because it drives technology, as if we would never have invented the plough, the fridge or the space satellite if it weren’t for an inbuilt urge to murder each other. Morris isn’t that kind of loon, so in his own words, ‘what sort of person goes around saying that thousands of years of mass murder have had positive consequences?’ His answer is, somebody who looks at the evidence. Our answer is, somebody who needs to look a bit harder at the evidence.

For a historian, Morris is surprisingly vague about dates. Consider the statement that ‘the Stone Age, we now know, was a rough place’. The source this statement links to is a study of 350 skulls in Britain, of which a surprising number had been bashed in. He goes on to describe how, ten thousand years ago, with few behavioural restraints, homicides were therefore a regular fact of life. But which Stone Age is he talking about? Ten thousand years ago was the end of the Paleolithic period of hunting and gathering (HG), followed by the development of farming in the Neolithic. The skulls, however, date from between 4,000 and 3,200BC, meaning that whatever skull-bashing was going on, it was certainly going on in the post-HG Neolithic period, a fact made very obvious even in the title of the original article (‘Muggings were rife in New Stone Age’, New Scientist, 11 May 2006).

Why talk about violence in the HG period using evidence from the much later farming period? In order, surely, to support the Pinker argument that HG violence was at epidemic rates. Indeed, he goes on to claim that ‘by many estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone Age societies died at the hands of other humans’.

This ‘appalling toll’ simply doesn’t make sense. Imagine a group of 30 HG individuals of whom half are male, and follow the common assumption that violence was almost exclusively between males. 10 to 20 percent means a death rate of between 3 and 6 males out of 15, year on year. What group could withstand this rate of loss? In 5 years at most the supply of males would be exhausted. Assuming female mortality is included, the situation gets even worse, because of the loss of breeding potential. Had we really behaved like this in the Paleolithic, we would have died out like the Neanderthals and the lately-discovered Denisovans.

But Morris presses on with his conviction that the life of hunters and gatherers was nasty, brutish and short, and states that ‘Ten thousand years ago, there were only about 6 million people on Earth. On average they lived about 30 years and supported themselves by hunting and gathering, on the equivalent of less than $2 per day in today's terms’. Leaving aside the silliness of giving HGs a dollar allowance as if they were in the same squalid situation of poverty as today’s ‘bottom billion’, the life-span estimate involves the ploy of using a mean instead of a modal average, thus taking no account of high rates of child mortality. On other estimates, Paleolithic humans who made it to age 15 had an average modal lifespan of 72 years (Gurven Kaplan paper).

Why is it so important to blacken the name of the Paleolithic in this way? Because if the longest period of human existence on the planet was in truth relatively peaceful and lacking in organised violence or warfare, as Marx and Engels thought and many anthropologists still think, then the Panglossian theme of Morris and Pinker is utterly undone. If there was no war in the Paleolithic, as the evidence in fact suggests, then there has not been a steady decline in violence from the dawn of humanity. Instead what happened is that farming and the invention of property society unleashed a holocaust upon a species which had known a million years of peace. If today this same property society has developed to the point where, as Morris hopes, it might be able to contain the problem of war, then it is only solving a problem it created in the first place.

But can it even do that? What’s stopping the next world war is that, given nuclear arsenals, the costs for any aggressor currently outweigh the gains. But that assumes all leaders are rational, which clearly some are not, and it also assumes the gains won’t increase, which clearly they will as states become ever more desperate in their competition over resources.

Ever since the fall of Soviet ‘communism’ there has been a Western feel-good factor among populations who grew up under the shadow of the bomb. Morris has tapped into this feeling that ‘the worst is over’ and is attempting to find a positive spin on a dark past. But the assumption of a continuing trend towards total peace is the same probability fallacy as the boom-time argument that there will never be another slump. In reality, there are wars all over the place, all of the time, and there’s no saying when a black swan event might crop up to send the world into a new abyss.

Marx, looking at the same history, didn’t simply cross his fingers and hope for the best, nor did he try to put a positive spin on the indefensible and obscene. Instead he said this: ‘When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production … then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.’

Competition over property caused war in the Neolithic, and still does today. We are now in a historic position to abolish war by abolishing property and sharing the world. Meanwhile to give the state, built on mountains of skulls, the credit for abating the worst excesses of its own evil nature is like giving the psychopathic bully a peace prize for not beating us up more often.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Digging up the Dirt (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

New excavations are suggesting that some complex settled societies sprang up thousands of years before agriculture, in a complete reversal of orthodox thinking about the Neolithic revolution. A dig at Wadi Faynan in south Jordan has unearthed what looks like an amphitheatre dated 11,500 years old, some three thousand years before settled farming, while another dig at Göbekli Tepe in southern Anatolia has revealed the world’s first temple, dated 11,000 years old (New Scientist, 5 October).

According to orthodoxy prehistoric hunter-gatherer (HG) communities, being nomadic due to the need to range for scarce food, were incapable of population expansion, of developing surpluses or ‘wealth’, and of creating sophisticated urban cultures, social stratification, writing and organised religion. This is why the Neolithic or agricultural revolution is called a revolution. An HG community with a theatre is understood to be about as likely as a fossilised rabbit found in a dinosaur’s stomach.

If temples and amphitheatres came first and agriculture came after, could it be that social and not material forces were the driving factor of change – ideology before subsistence? Perhaps HG groups invited a lot of people to ritual raves and then found they needed to develop better ways of producing food on-site. Instead of temples being a product of urban life, perhaps temples gradually grew villages and towns around themselves like particles attracting mass.

But the materialist view, upon which the case for socialism is built, doesn’t insist that settled civilisation depended on agriculture, it only says that settled civilisation depended on a reliable food supply. In most cases that would have meant agriculture, but if it could be provided some other way, eg. by natural abundance or spaceships dropping food parcels, then so be it. Apparently these sites were stocked up food-wise, but pre-agriculture this could hardly have been the norm. A neo-Hegelian counter-attack against materialism, whereby culture determines material conditions, doesn’t seem on the cards quite yet.

Another major boulder was dropped in the anthropological pond recently by Steven Pinker’s recent book The Better Angels of our Nature (reviewed on page 20, short interview on page 13).

Pinker’s theory can also be seen as ammunition against socialism, for two reasons. First, if capitalism is able to deliver peaceful non-violence, even in theory, a major plank of the socialist case against it is removed, since that case argues that capitalism is intrinsically violent and divisive. Secondly, it upends fondly-held ideas about so-called primitive communism in which Mesolithic hunter-gatherer bands existed in a state of noble grace until mean old property-based society came along to turn free love into Fight Club.

Does Pinker intend his argument to be used this way, as neo-Hobbesian propaganda? Probably he won’t lose sleep if it is, given his own unexamined assumptions about what socialism really is (ie. Stalin, tanks and purges). But the evidence is what it is. If it is damaging to the socialist case, that’s a problem for us.

In the first place, accepting for argument’s sake that the murder rate has declined through history (and guessing about prehistory), we would have to congratulate capitalism on a job well done. Or partly well done. Credit where it’s due. But could it achieve zero-crime and zero-violence in the future? Perhaps, with hyper-surveillance and the utter subjugation of workers, mind and body. It’s hard to see how it could achieve zero-war unless one ruling class were able to destroy all the other ruling classes in a global war and then dominate the smoking ruins that were left. That capitalism has made progress in reducing violence does not mean that it will continue to do so, or that socialism could not do better.

In the second place, it is not supposed that primitive communism was a Garden of Eden, merely that it was unlikely to have been a warzone. Marx and Engels speculated that, in the absence of property relations before agriculture, there would be no material incentive for class society, war, female oppression and all the other features of today’s ‘civilised’ world. And indeed, there’s no sign of prehistoric warfare, weaponry, fortifications and the like, despite the fact that the available evidence is more than enough to reveal such signs if they were there. Such signs tend to be unambiguous and hard to miss. Incidences of conflict prior to 10,000 years ago constitute a ‘tiny handful’ and ‘are very much the exception’. Conversely, the 11,500 year old Abu Hureya settlement near the Euphrates, for example, shows continuous occupation for 4,000 years with no sign of violence whatever (John Horgan, Scientific American blog, 29 June 2010).

Suppose, again for argument’s sake, one were to leap the credibility gap and grant Pinker the best possible case, that violence has been endemic in all human societies, no matter how far back you go, no matter what the material conditions. Even then, would this prove that aggression was written into the genes, as Pinker and others are wont to conclude? No, it wouldn’t. It would only prove that material conditions were not the only factor behind violence. Marx’s argument about materialism was not that it was the sole factor in determining social conditions, but that it was the decisive factor among several. In prehistoric societies there could have been other factors at play.

A recent study of ‘lethal aggression events’ among mobile forager bands seems to bear this out (‘New study of foragers undermines claim that war has deep evolutionary roots’, Scientific American, 18 July). Of the 21 groups observed, three had no lethal events whatsoever, a problematical result for Pinker and other natural violence advocates. Of 148 documented events only two were due to fights over resources, most of the others being ‘miscellaneous personal disputes’ such as insults, jealousy and theft – interestingly suggesting that property concepts cause trouble even in HG bands. Significantly, the most common cause of violence was revenge for previous attacks, showing that violence once established breeds more violence. Almost all the events involving multiple attackers and multiple victims, which the observers categorise as ‘war’, stemmed from just one group.

Not content with arguing for natural human aggression, some enthusiasts want to trace it all the way back to our ape forebears. Notable here is Richard Wrangham with his ‘demonic ape’ thesis. But the evidence for innate ape violence is just as flimsy and opposition to it strong. ‘Chimpicide’ seems to be a cultural artefact, neither universal nor innate. The relatively peaceful bonobo pygmy chimp also stymies such claims. Meanwhile studies of the oldest known human ancestor, the 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus ramidus, have caused a ‘tectonic shift’ in anthropological circles recently, according to one researcher: ‘We now know, especially in light of Ardipithecus, that hominids have always been a far less aggressive clade than are chimpanzees or even bonobos’ (Horgan, 2010).

Why Pinker, Wrangham and others are so keen to show that violence is innate can only be guessed at. Were it true, capitalism could be acquitted of all war crimes and socialist revolution represented as  pointless. At stake is the essential Hobbesian question, can we be free or must we always be ruled? Socialists say that we can and should be free, and we work to create a future in which humans make themselves anew and are not bound by supposed primitive behavioural urges, whether these are angelic or demonic.

Pathfinder: Brave New Epsilons (2010)

The Pathfinder Column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine going to a job interview in twenty years time. Chances are, you’ll have to take along your ID, your CV, and your personal genomic profile. One of the gene variants an employer might be looking for is Epsilon 4, which is thought to significantly increase your likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Some notable genome self-publishers like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker are choosing not to publish the Epsilon 4 part of their genome, perhaps understandably. As one researcher remarks, “I wouldn’t want to know whether I’ve got one and I certainly wouldn’t want other people to know” (New Scientist, 13 February).

The problem for workers is, genome-sequencing is already in the 3-figure dollar range and it won’t be long before we will be expected to provide a genome survey in order to get work, just like house sellers will now be required to provide the buyer with a house survey. The more privileged members of this brave new capitalism will no doubt ‘do a Pinker’, but workers in all probability will not be allowed to keep quiet about Epsilon 4, or anything else for that matter, and will be entirely at the mercy of what the bosses decide they don’t like. Unless more workers start inserting copies of this magazine into their jeans, we could all end up as Epsilon-class workers.

‘Just out driving my new Toyota Prius. Text later. Can’t stop.’
Possibly last month’s best SMS joke. In the midst of the fuss over the large-scale recall of the accursed vehicle, some engineers are doing the predictable thing and, with a knowing stroke of the greying whiskers, remarking that “O’course, they be too damn complicated these days, too much to go wrong. That’s their problem right there, I tell ‘ee.” Although the Prius problem was entirely and mundanely mechanical, speculation also centres round another of Toyota’s products, the Lexus. The more that modern car designs move from mechanical to electronic systems the greater the risk of electromagnetic interference (EMI), and designs like the Lexus with electronically-controlled acceleration or ‘drive by wire’ are now thought to be at risk of EMI-induced ‘sudden unintended acceleration’(New Scientist, 13 February).

Meanwhile, reports that increasing sunspot activity is likely to interfere with sat-nav systems provide a double-whammy (‘Sat-nav devices face big errors as solar activity rises’, BBC Online, 10 Feb). One can envisage whole convoys of flashy car drivers all roaring off down arbitrary highways like bats into hell, the blind leading the blindingly fast. Still, it could be worse. At least dodgy cars are being recalled these days. If the free-market capitalists got their way we might return to the unregulated days of the notorious Ford Pinto, whose manufacturers allegedly decided to pay off accident fatalities’ families rather than stop selling the dangerous car. All in all it makes you think about oiling that pushbike.

Public no longer believes poll findings, poll finds
Two recent polls commissioned by the Times newspaper and the BBC suggest that the UK public are becoming more climate sceptical, no doubt because they imagine the unusually heavy snow on their front lawn has blanketed the entire world and heralds a ten thousand year ice age. As the snow piled up, so did the column inches, with journalists speculating about why climate catastrophe has fallen so out of favour (see for instance ‘Climate scepticism 'on the rise'’, BBC poll shows’, (BBC Online, 7 February).

Favourite theories are the East Anglia email scandal, the hopeless effort at Copenhagen, and most recently the raw wet omelette served on the face of the International Panel on Climate Change by their careless and spectacularly erroneous claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, rather than the original and more accurate date of 2350. Interestingly this error has been traced back to an article in New Scientist, which observed that the panel has been ‘severely criticised for citing a non-peer-reviewed magazine’ (see New Scientist, 23 January, p5 – in a very small box).

But wait a moment, isn’t everyone getting a bit carried away? Scientists can make mistakes, can’t they? In fact the ability to make and identify mistakes forms the basis of all science. There may be some buffoons out there bonkers enough to think that if scientists get one thing wrong then they must have everything else wrong too, but that surely can’t apply to the whole population.

In all the journalistic hoo-ha about rising climate scepticism there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of poll scepticism, yet are the polls really significant or just a blip? As most people no doubt realise, polls are the journalist’s best buddy but make for unreliable real-world guides, especially in areas other than elections where they are unlikely to be corroborated later by hard facts. In the first place, they can be designed to produce the findings the poll-funders are looking for (or else, if they don’t, the funders don’t publish the findings). Even supposing the funder is genuinely disinterested in the findings (the BBC and Murdoch-owned Times are not climate sceptics so presumably weren’t hoping for this result, unless the idea was to manufacture some controversial headlines) there is no peer-review or general oversight of the polling methodology employed. What suggests the polls are a blip is the timing. One would, for instance, have to question the wisdom of asking people standing in two feet of snow whether they were especially concerned about global warming at the present time. One further wonders whether the BBC and the Times will be doing follow-up polls in flaming June or blue-sky July. Finally there is the question, admittedly a cynic’s recourse: do people tell pollsters the truth anyway, or merely make a little devilment out of the business? Why would they lie, you might ask? But equally, why shouldn’t they? Anyone who doesn’t believe this is possible has clearly never filled in a market survey report on branded products. In view of all this, does anyone apart from material-hungry journalists actually believe in polls? Maybe we should have a poll and find out.

Note to self
Lastly and a propos none of the above, a quick word from our BBC economics advisor Robert Peston:“It's plainly better for banks to make profits, than not (unless you are actively working for the destruction of capitalism)” (BBC blog entry, 16th February). Ok Bob, now there’s an idea...

Paddy Shannon

Human nature and human behaviour (2003)

Book Review from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Steven Pinker is a leading representative of the school known as "evolutionary psychology". Their basic position is that humans today still have, not just the same physical brain as the first members of homo sapiens (which is uncontroversial), but also the same mental make-up, i.e. that we think and react as if we were still primitive hunter-scavenger-gatherers living in small bands on the open grasslands of East Africa (where, again, it is generally agreed our species first evolved). In fact, they go further and argue that Darwinian principles apply just as much to these psychological traits as to our physical anatomy and physiology and that they, too, evolved through natural selection - the survival of the most fitted - out of those of that particular line of ape-like creatures from which homo sapiens is descended. Hence their name of "evolutionary psychologists".

In itself this hypothesis is unobjectionable. Insofar as psychological traits are inheritable (and some will be) then they would have a physical basis (in the brain) and so would have been subject to the same evolutionary selection as the rest of our bodies. The argument is about precisely which psychological and behavioural traits might be heritable. However, geneticists and neuroscientists are nowhere near discovering the mechanisms by which any personality traits would be inherited, let alone which are and which aren't. So any claims in this area at the moment are highly speculative.

Not that this deters Pinker and his fellow thinkers from indulging in the wildest speculation (but psychology has always been prone to this). For instance, as he repeats in his latest book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, humans all over the world like pictures of "open grassland dotted with trees and bodies of water and inhabited by animals and flowering and fruiting plants" because they have inherited through their genes "a search image" of what was, when we first evolved, "the optimal human habitat". This of course is a claim that certain specific ideas can be inherited. It is a revival of the old idea that humans are born with certain ideas; that certain ideas are innate. Which is highly controversial.

According to Pinker, the Blank Slate is "the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves". He interprets this as meaning that there is no such thing as human nature as it implies that there are no biological limits to how humans can be taught or can learn to behave. This is "the modern denial of human nature" that he sets out to criticise.

The ignoble savage
His tactics, however, are not that honest since he claims that the Blank Slate theory has two "companion doctrines": the Noble Savage and the Ghost in the Machine. The first is associated with the 18th century French philosopher, JJ Rousseau, and holds that pre-civilised humans were innately "good". The second is the view, held by all religions, that mind and matter are two completely different things and that the mind is to be equated with the "soul" which exists in a quite different dimension from the body. This view tends to see humans as inherently sinful, i.e. "bad".

What is dishonest about Pinker's approach here is that there is no link between the theory of the Blank Slate - which, presumably, holds that human nature is neither good nor bad but dependent on external circumstances - and theories which hold either that human nature is good or that it is bad. Pinker's main enemy is in fact not so much the Blank Slate as the Noble Savage. To back up his particular speculative explanation of current human behaviour he has to defend the opposite view - that of the Ignoble Savage whose males go around seducing or raping as many females as possible and killing without compunction rival males, just so that their particular set of genes will survive.

Pinker does, however, write as an open materialist and atheist and the best part of his book is where he demolishes the dualist theory of the mind and shows that the mind is both a product and a part of the rest of the material world.

His main argument, however, is not with the Ghost in the Machine brigade but with a rival materialist school, the American Behaviorists, whose founder, JB Watson, notoriously wrote in 1924 that he would like to be able to cl..

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talent, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors".

Pinker attributes this view to Marx but only on the basis of the views of Zedong, Pol Pot and O'Brien in Orwell's 1984. He also attributes it to the school of Cultural Anthropologists, as represented by writers such as Margaret Mead, Ashley Montagu and Leslie A White, which did so much work in the 1940s and 1950s to throw light on human behaviour.

The straw man
We are not required to defend everything that Marx or the Cultural Anthropologists said or did. However, neither thought that the mind had no structure or that there was no such thing as human nature.

Both Marx and the Cultural Anthropologists rejected Blank Slatism for one of the reasons Pinker advances for knocking down his straw man who believes in it: "That the mind can't be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything". Precisely. The brain is not just a passive receptor of sense-impressions (experience) but plays an active role in organising these impressions so as to make sense of them (understand them). This capacity to organise sense-impressions is part of human biological nature.

Clearly, before humans could develop culture - "accumulated local wisdom: ways of fashioning artifacts, selecting food, dividing up windfalls, and so on", as Pinker defines it, which is learned and passed on by non-biological means - they had to have brains capable of learning and of using language and of thinking abstractly with symbols representing parts of the outside world. These brains had to have evolved and are just as much a part of "human nature" as walking upright and stereoscopic colour vision. So, there's no denial of human nature here.

As to Marx, of course Mao Zedong and Pol Pot as state-capitalist dictators were the opposite of everything Marx ever stood for and can in no way be considered as exponents of his point of view. Marx's views on "human nature" were mainly expressed in his philosophical writings in the 1840s. At that time, although human anatomy and physiology were fairly well understood, neither how this had evolved nor the functioning of the brain were. Darwin was still digesting the notes made during his voyage on The Beagle and some comrades of Marx and Engels in the Communist League of Germany felt there might be something in phrenology, the theory that bumps on the head were a guide to someone's personality.

So Marx's approach was inevitably philosophical. For him, human nature was the "normal" mode of behaviour and mental outlook in any given society at any given period and, being determined by external material circumstances (physical but above all social), varied over type of society, time and place.

For him, then, human nature was not fixed, but variable. Actually, what he was talking about was what we would now call rather "human behaviour". Thus, when he wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847 that "all history is nothing but the continuous transformation of human nature" he was really talking not about human nature in the biological sense but about human behaviour.

To say that human behaviour is variable is not to say that it is infinitely malleable. Nor that it is passively determined. To accuse Marx of attributing a purely passive role to the mind/brain is to demonstrate a complete ignorance of where he was coming from. Marx was brought up in the German philosophical tradition which attributed a very active role to the mind. He took this over and purged it of its idealism, while keeping an active role for the mind in ordering experiences in order to understand them. This, in fact, this is his criticism of some of his contemporary materialists such as Robert Owen who could be seen as having a passive, blank-slate theory of the mind. Here, for instance, is his 1845 criticism of "contemplative materialism" as he called it:

"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism -- which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such" (Theses on Feuerbach).

The defender of capitalism
Once a distinction is made between human nature (biological, and which can hardly have changed since homo sapiens evolved) and socially and culturally determined human behaviour (which has changed throughout pre-history and history), then the issue becomes clearer. It can be seen, not to be about whether or not there is such a thing as biological nature which is inherited and determined by genes (of course there is, so there's "no denial of human nature"), but about the extent of this and in particular whether or not it includes specific ideas or behaviour patterns.

Pinker, who is a specialist in the psychology of language acquisition, himself inadvertently brings out the distinction between human nature and human behaviour. He only claims that humans inherit, through the genes that govern the structure and physiology of the brain, a capacity to learn a language. He does not claim that humans inherit the ability to speak a particular language. In other words, the capacity is biologically determined ("nature" if you like) but the content arises from learned experience ("nurture" if you like). The same can be said about culture: the capacity to acquire and develop it is biological but the content is learned.

So what's the argument all about then? Basically, about how many of these various biologically inherited "capacities" there might be. Pinker wants to go much further than most neuroscientists and argue that there are separate biologically inherited capacities for a whole range of things, such as a capacity to seek social status or a capacity for aggressive behaviour or a capacity for men to seek to have as many children as possible. Even if true, their content - how they were expressed - would still be determined by learning, by culture, by the specific form of society in which humans were bought up and lived.

But is it true? In the end, this is a question about the precise nature and structure of the human brain; which is a matter of scientific research. There are two schools of thought amongst neuroscientists. Pinker writes that "many cognitive scientists believe that human reasoning is not accomplished by a single, general purpose computer in the head". The word "many" disguises the fact that just as many, if not more, take the opposite view, i.e. that the brain is "a general purpose learning device". We will have to let neuroscientists settle this themselves as their researches advance.

Pinker, however, is not really writing as a scientist. His book is a work of moral and political philosophy rather than biology. He wants the one school of neuroscientists to be right rather than the other because, otherwise, his whole case collapses for a biological human nature that does not allow human behaviour to be sufficiently flexible to allow a socialist society to work.

For Pinker is writing as a clear opponent, not just of Russian or Chinese-style state capitalism but also of socialism properly understood. On two occasions he criticises the idea that society could function on the basis of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", once explicitly rejecting it in favour of Adam Smith and the profit motive. He argues that society can only function on the basis of equal exchange, which he calls "reciprocity" but which Marxists call "the law of value". In other words, he's an ordinary defender of capitalism in its present form as the best, and in fact the only possible, form of society.

Not that he has properly understood what socialism is about. He seems to think that it means state-imposed equality and criticises this for not recognising that people are not equal in capacities. But whoever said they were? The very socialist slogan he criticises recognises that individual humans differ in both abilities and needs. Socialism is not a society where we would all be issued with equal rations, but one in which we would all be considered of equal worth and be able to have an equal say in the way things are run; and in which we recognise ourselves as members of an interdependent community where different people perform different functions and where everybody, irrespective of their function, has access to what they need to live and enjoy life just because they are members of the human race. And this doesn't require us to be any less selfish or more altruistic than we are today - it's not about changing human nature but about changing the basis of society.

Adam Buick