File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-02.144, message 37


Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 20:15:37 PST
Subject: Re: M-I: Reinstating the Beast in Man (Was: Are Apes Naughty 
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)


: Louis R Godena <louisgodena-AT-ids.net> at
: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 14:28:56 -0500 (EST) wrote: 

It is nice to see you return to the kind of topic that would have
interested Lisa Rogers.
Evolutionary psychology as Robert Wright pointed out in his popular book
on that subject- The Moral Animal- is to a large extant a repackaging of
sociobiology. Back in the 1970's sociobiology took quite a beating on the
grounds that it was simply an updated version of social Darwinism which like the earlier versions would provide a
"scientific" rationale for hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Nor
was this fear misplaced since its most prominent public champion,
entomologist E.O. Wilson is a man with neo-conservative political views.
Furthermore, in France "new right" intellectuals took up sociobiology
precisely because they believed it could be used to justify racist,
anti-Semitism and so forth. Nevertheless, the basic notion underlying
sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: that human behavior can be
understood in
Darwinian terms is not necessarily incompatible with a progressive
political outlook.
Lisa, herself attempted to synthesize sociobiology with Marxism as exemplified in her studies of foraging as a mode of production. Marxists going
back to Engels and Kautsky have long been concerned with integrating Marxism with Darwinism. This a
topic worthy of further exploration.
                               James F.

>        
>Is politics truly about ordering society or liberating mankind?    
>Poetry
>about the human condition?    Music and painting about 
>self-expression?
>Literature about wit,  irony, and sharpness?
>
>Think again.
>
>Deep down,  according to the new discipline of evolutionary 
>psychology,
>they are all mating displays.
>
>The practitioners of EP believe they are in the vanguard of a 
>revolution
>that will change the way we think about -- and govern -- ourselves.
>Critics grumble that EP is just another name for some old -- and some 
>not
>very creditable -- Darwinist social theories.
>
>Briefly,  EP argues that ideology owes a lot to the behavior of our 
>tribal
>ancestors who roamed the savannah,  that student protests are a kind 
>of
>dating service,  that creative genius emerged as a way of obtaining 
>sex,
>that technology is merely a side-effect of adaptations originally 
>designed
>for courtship.    
>
>Such views are anathema to many people across a wide gamut of 
>political
>thought.    Feminists hate it,  leftists fear it,  and church leaders 
>see it
>as man's final plunge into moral relativism.    Yet, EP,  which grew
>paradoxically out of the dialectical anthropology movement of the 
>1970s --
>and which embraced,  at least briefly,  leftist social scientists such 
>as
>Eugene Genovese and Clifford Geertz -- could be useful in explaining 
>the
>historical origins of our emotions,  dreams and desires.
>
>According to evolutionary psychologists such as Geoffrey Miller 
>(University
>of London) and Adam Phillips (Harvard),  two forces were at work in 
>all
>animal behavior: sexual selection (which produced,  for example,  the
>peacock's tail) and selection for survival (fear of predators).    One 
>is
>often in conflict with the other: males will take risks in order to 
>eat more
>in order to get big to fight other males and mate more frequently.    
>What
>EP tries to do with human behavior is to ask if courtship functions 
>can be
>identified in a lot of behavior traditionally thought to be either for
>survival or to have no function at all (Miller, *Evolutionary 
>Adaptions in
>Human Society* [London, Macmillan,  forthcoming],  Phillips,  *On 
>Kissing,
>Tickling,  and Being Bored* [Cambridge, Mass., 1996: Harvard 
>University
>Press).   
>
>EP's aim is to show the historical substrate or framework from which
>everyday decisions derive.  "No part of your mind has to know what 
>you're up
>to,  any more than your heart has to know that it's a pump,"  says 
>Miller,
>"It's just that the mechanism is there,  the motivation and the 
>capacity."
>Thus,  the Enlightenment *philosophes* nor Beethoven nor Karl Marx
>necessarily knew that they were merely showing off for women.   They, 
>too,
>were the product "of hundreds of thousands of generations of ancestors 
>who
>survived to reproduce.   Even if [they] didn't make it,  all the 
>mental
>equipment was there".     Miller goes on, rhetorically:  "If the most
>beautiful sounds and sights in nature like the peacock's tail,  the 
>bower
>bird's bower,  the song of the hump-backed whale,  are all due to sex
>selection...It shouldn't be any surprise that the most sublime and 
>wonderful
>products of human nature are as well."   
>
>If EP is so good at identifying motivational factors for human 
>behavior,
>doesn't it tend to erode the notion of criminal culpability?    And 
>isn't
>there a fundamental conflict between contemporary psychology and the 
>legal
>system,  whose notions of guilt and human nature come from the Middle 
>Ages?
>And wouldn't Marx,  especially,  rail against the reductionism that 
>employs
>zoology to explain human beings?   
>
>On the other hand,  as in the case of Canadian statistical research 
>which
>shows that children are much more likely to be battered and killed by
>stepfathers than by real fathers,  EP could provide a paradigmatic 
>basis for
>identifying vulnerabilities,  dangers and biases in human nature.
>Similarly,  it can help explain purely "cultural" phenomenon.     
>Young men
>are vastly overrepresented as producers of culture;  we are awash with 
>their
>art,  music and political ideologies.    Not necessarily for courtship 
>or
>display,  perhaps, but surely a by-product of youth's capacity to 
>engage
>thus.    "We should never be insulted that part of human nature was 
>shaped
>by sexual selection,"  claims Miller; "All we're saying is that it was
>crafted not by blimb,  dumb Nature but by the most intelligent 
>selectors
>that every existed before humans -- our ancestors."   After all,  he
>continues,  "even an abstract capacity like moral integrity could have 
>been
>sexually selected."
>
>And Marx himself would have pointed out that even chimps experience 
>moral
>conflict and punish friends who betray and cheat.
>
>Louis Godena 
>
>
>
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