Hi. Short review and some of the text of "A Darwinian Left" by Peter
Singer, the Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University
and the author of Animal Liberation (1975). He has also edited quite a few
books on ethics.
Singer's idea in "A Darwinian Left" is that it is those on the right of the
political spectrum who have been most enticed by Darwinian ideas. He says
we in the Left should drop our idealistic vision of the human race and the
world as a potential utopia and encourage the self-interest and "reciprocal
altruism" (cooperation) that is inherent in all of us.
One way Darwin is approached is that maximal diversity increases the odds
of survival and that the most adaptable and adaptive beings will thrive
(not actually survival of the fittest but survival of the most adaptive
diverse system). Darwin would probably be appalled by the mostly American
adaptations of his ideas into the corporate ethos. Singer's summary of the
philosophy of the left in opposition to this ethos is a bit nebulous. In
this short book he concentrates too much on what the left has failed to
achieve over the last century and a half rather than what can be achieved
in the next century.
Still, the book is interesting and there are some good ideas. The reference
to Hegel is insightful and some readings of Nietzsche would fit in well.
Singer believes that self-interest is wider than what we usually mean by it
in a political sense. In addition to monetary self-interest there is also
the need to belong to society and be useful to your fellow human beings.
This isn't a concept our PM or =46ederal Treasurer would be able to wrap
their heads around.
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Peter Singer - "A Darwinian Left"
(70 pages, 1999, Wiedenfield and Nicolson, London)
This book is part of a series by leading figures in the field of
evolutionary theory that developed out of the Darwin@LSE program at
the London School of Economics.
This following is not the full text of the book, if you'd like to know
more I suggest you buy it, the ideas are expanded on in it.
----------------------------------------------------------------
By Peter Singer
The left needs a new paradigm. The collapse of communism and the
abandonment by democratic socialist parties of the traditional
socialist aim of public ownership have deprived the left of the goals
it cherished over the two centuries in which it grew to a position of
great political power and intellectual influence. My focus here is not
so much with the left as a politically organised force, as with the
left as a broad body of thought, a spectrum of ideas about achieving a
better society. The left, in this sense, is urgently in need of new
ideas. I want to suggest that one source of such ideas is an approach
to human behaviour based firmly on a modern understanding of human
nature. It is time for the left to take seriously the fact that we
have evolved from other animals; we bear the evidence of this
inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in what we want
and how we are likely to try to get it. In other words, it is time to
develop a Darwinian left.
Can the left adopt Darwin and still remain left? That depends on what
it considers essential. Let me answer this in a personal way. During
the past year, I have completed both a television documentary and a
book about Henry Spira. This name will mean nothing to most people,
but Spira is the most remarkable person I have ever worked with. When
he was 12, his family lived in Panama. His father ran a small store,
which was not doing well; to save money the family accepted an offer
from a rich friend to stay in his house. The house was a mansion that
took up an entire city block. One day, two men who worked for the
owner asked Henry if he wanted to come with them when they collected
rents. He went and saw how the luxurious existence of his father's
benefactor was financed; they went into the slums, where poor people
were menaced by the armed rent collectors. At the time, Henry had no
concept of "the left," but from that day on, he was part of it. Later
Spira moved to the US, became a Trotskyist, worked as a seaman, was
blacklisted during the McCarthy era, went to the South to support
black people, left the Trotskyists because they had lost touch with
reality, and taught ghetto kids in New York. As if that wasn't enough,
in 1973 he read my essay "Animal Liberation" and decided that here was
another group of exploited beings that needed help. He has
subsequently become the single most effective activist of the US
animal rights movement.
Spira has a knack for putting things plainly. When I asked him why he
has spent his life working for these causes, he said simply that he is
on the side of the weak, not the powerful, of the oppressed, not the
oppressor, of the ridden, not the rider. He spoke of the huge quantity
of pain and suffering that exists in our universe, and of his desire
to do something to reduce it. This, I think, is what the left is
about. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the
weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off,
we are not of the left. The left wants to change this situation. There
are many different ideas of equality which are compatible with this
broad picture of the left. But in a world in which the 400 richest
people have a combined net worth greater than the bottom 45 per cent
of the world's population, it is not hard to find some common ground
on working towards a more equal distribution of resources.
So much for the left. What about the politics of Darwinism? One way of
answering the question is to invoke the fact-value distinction. Since
to be "of the left" is to hold certain values, and Darwin's theory is
a scientific one, the impossibility of deducing values from facts
means that evolution has nothing to do with left or right. So there
can be a Darwinian left as easily as there can be a Darwinian right.
It is, of course, the right which has drawn most on Darwinian
thinking. Andrew Carnegie, for example, appealed to evolution to
suggest that economic competition will lead to the "survival of the
fittest," and so will make most people better off. Darwinian thinking
is also invoked in the claim that social policies may be helping the
"less fit" to survive, and thus have deleterious genetic consequences.
This claim is highly speculative. Its factual basis is strongest in
regard to the provision of life-saving medical treatment to people
with genetically-linked diseases; without treatment, these people
would die before they could reproduce. There are, no doubt, many more
people with early-onset diabetes being born because of the discovery
of insulin. But no one would seriously propose withholding insulin
from children with diabetes in order to avoid the genetic consequences
of providing insulin.
But there is a more general aspect of Darwinian thinking that does
need to be taken seriously. That is the claim that an understanding of
human nature in the light of evolutionary theory can help us to assess
the price we will have to pay for achieving our social and political
goals. This does not imply that any social policy is wrong because it
is contrary to Darwinian ideas. Rather, it leaves the ethical decision
up to us and merely provides information relevant to that decision.
The core of the left worldview is a set of values; but there is also a
penumbra of factual beliefs that have typically been associated with
the left. We need to ask whether these factual beliefs are at odds
with Darwinian thinking; if they are, what would the left be like
without them?
The intellectual left, and Marxists in particular, have generally been
enthusiastic about Darwin's account of the origin of species, as long
as its implications for human beings are confined to anatomy and
physiology. Marx's materialist theory of history implies that there is
no fixed human nature. It changes with each new mode of production. It
has already changed in the past - between primitive communism and
feudalism, and between feudalism and capitalism - and it could change
again in the future.
Belief in the malleability of human nature has been important for the
left because it has provided grounds for hoping that a different kind
of society is possible. The real reason why the left rejected
Darwinism is that it dashed the left's great dream: the perfectibility
of man. Even before Plato's Republic, the idea of building a perfect
society had been present in the western consciousness. For as long as
the left has existed, it has sought a society in which all human
beings live harmoniously and cooperatively with each other in peace
and freedom. For Darwin, on the other hand, the struggle for
existence, or at least for the existence of one's offspring, is
unending.
In the 20th century, the dream of the perfectibility of humankind
turned into the nightmares of Stal-inist Russia, China during the
Cultural Revolution and Cambodia under Pol Pot. From these nightmares
the left awoke in turmoil. There have been attempts to create a new
and better society with less terrible results - Castro's Cuba, the
Israeli kibbutzim - but none are unqualified successes. The dream of
perfectibility should be put behind us, and with that, one barrier to
a Darwinian left has been removed.
But what about the malleability of human nature? What do we mean by
malleability and how essential is it to the left? Let us divide human
behaviour into three categories: that which shows great variation
across culture; some variation across culture; and little or no
variation across culture.
In the first category, showing great variation, I would include the
way we produce our food - by gathering and hunting, by grazing
domestic animals, or by growing crops. To these differences would
correspond differences in lifestyles - nomadic or settled - as well as
differences in the kinds of food we eat. This first category would
also include economic structures, religious practices and forms of
government - but not, significantly, the existence of some form of
government, which seems to be nearly universal.
In the second category, showing some variation, I would include
sexuality. Victorian anthropologists were very impressed by the
differences between attitudes to sexuality in their own society and
those in the societies they studied; as a result, we tend to
exaggerate the extent to which sexual morality is relative to culture.
There are, of course, important differences between societies that
allow men to have one wife and those that allow men to have more than
one wife; but almost every society has a system of marriage that
implies restrictions on sexual intercourse outside marriage. Moreover,
while men may be allowed one wife or more, according to the culture,
systems of marriage in which women are allowed more than one husband
are rare. Whatever the rules of marriage may be, and no matter how
severe the sanctions, infidelity and sexual jealousy seem to be
universal elements of human sexual behaviour.
In this second category I would also include ethnic identification and
its opposite, xenophobia and racism. I live in a multicultural society
with a relatively low level of racism; but I know that racist feelings
do exist among Australians, and they can be stirred up by demagogues.
The tragedy of Bosnia has shown how ethnic hatred can be revived among
people who have lived peacefully with each other for decades. Racism
can be learned and unlearned, but racist demagogues hold their torches
over highly flammable material.
In the third category, showing little variation across cultures, I
would include the fact that we are social beings and that we are
concerned for the interests of our kin. Our readiness to form
cooperative relationships and to recognise reciprocal obligations is
another universal. More controversially, I would claim that the
existence of a hierarchy or system of rank is an almost universal
human tendency. There are very few human societies without differences
in social status; when attempts are made to abolish such differences,
they tend to re-emerge rapidly. Finally, gender roles also show
relatively little variation. Women almost always play the main role in
caring for young children, while men are much more likely than women
to be involved in physical conflict, both within the social group and
in warfare between groups. Men also tend to have a disproportionate
role in the political leadership of the group.
Of course, culture does have an influence in sharpening or softening
even those tendencies that are most deeply rooted in our human nature.
And there can be variations between individuals. Nothing I have said
is contradicted by the existence of individuals who do not care for
their kin, or couples where the man looks after the children while the
woman serves in the army. I must also stress that my rough
classification of human behaviour carries no evaluative overtones. I
am not saying that because male dominance is characteristic of almost
all societies, that it is therefore good, or acceptable, or that we
should not attempt to change it. My point is not about deducing an
"ought" from an "is," but about estimating the price we may have to
pay for achieving our goals.
=46or example, if we live in a society with a hierarchy based on a
hereditary aristocracy, and we abolish that aristocracy, as the French
and American revolutionaries did, we are likely to find that a new
hierarchy emerges, based perhaps on military power or wealth. When the
Bolshevik revolution in Russia abolished both the hereditary
aristocracy and private wealth, a hierarchy soon developed on the
basis of rank and influence within the Communist party; this became
the basis for all sorts of privileges. The tendency to form
hierarchies shows itself in all sorts of petty ways in corporations
and bureaucracies, where people place enormous importance on how big
their office is, and how many windows it has. None of this shows that
hierarchy is good, or desirable, or even inevitable; but it does show
that getting rid of it is not going to be as easy as previous
revolutionaries thought.
The left has to accept and understand our nature as evolved beings.
But there are different ways of working with the tendencies inherent
in human nature. The market economy is based on the idea that human
beings can be relied upon to work hard and show initiative only if by
doing so they will further their own economic interests. To serve our
own interests we will strive to produce better goods than our
competitors, or to produce similar goods more cheaply. Thus, as Adam
Smith said, the self-interested desires of a multitude of individuals
are drawn together, as if by a hidden hand, to work for the benefit of
all. Garrett Hardin summarised this view in The Limits of Altruism
when he wrote that public policies should be based on "an unwavering
adherence to the cardinal rule: never ask a person to act against his
own self-interest." In theory - abstract theory that is, free from any
assumptions about human nature - a state monopoly should be able to
provide the cheapest and most efficient utility services, transport
services or, for that matter, bread supply; indeed, such a monopoly
would have huge advantages of scale and would not have to make profits
for its owners. However, when we take into account the popular
assumption that self-interest - more specifically, the desire to
enrich oneself - drives human beings to work well, the picture
changes. If the community owns an enterprise, its managers do not
profit from its success. Their own economic interest and that of the
enterprise pull in different directions. The result is, at best,
inefficiency; at worst, widespread corruption and theft. Privatising
the enterprise will ensure that the owners will take steps to reward
management in accordance with performance; in turn, the managers will
take steps to ensure that the enterprise runs as efficiently as
possible.
This is one way of tailoring our institutions to human nature, or at
least to one view of human nature. But it is not the only way. Even
within the terms of Hardin's cardinal rule, we still have to ask what
we mean by "self-interest." The acquisition of material wealth, beyond
a relatively modest level, has little to do with self-interest in the
biological sense of maximising the number of descendants one leaves in
future generations. There is no reason to assume that increasing
personal wealth must, either consciously or unconsciously, be the goal
that people set for themselves. It is often said that money cannot buy
happiness. This may be trite, but it implies that it is more in our
interests to be happy than to be rich. Properly understood,
self-interest is broader than economic self-interest. Most people want
their lives to be happy, fulfilling, or meaningful; they recognise
that money is at best a means of achieving part of these ends. Public
policy does not have to rely on self-interest in this narrow economic
sense.
Modern Darwinian thought embraces both competition and reciprocal
altruism (a more technical term for cooperation). Focusing on the
competitive element, modern market economies are premised on the idea
that we are driven by acquisitive and competitive desires. Free market
economies are designed to channel our acquisitive and competitive
desires so that they work for the good of all. Undoubtedly, this is
better than a situation in which they work only for the good of a few.
But even when competitive consumer societies work at their best, they
are not the only way of harmonising our nature with the common good.
Instead we should seek to encourage a broader sense of self-interest,
in which we seek to build on the social and cooperative side of our
nature rather than the individualistic and competitive side.
Robert Axelrod's work on the prisoner's dilemma provides a basis for
building a more cooperative society. The prisoner's dilemma describes
a situation in which two people can each choose whether or not to
cooperate with the other. The catch is that each does better,
individually, by not cooperating; but if both make this choice, they
will both be worse off than they would have been if they had both
chosen to cooperate. The outcome of rational, self-interested choices
by two or more individuals can make all of them worse off than they
would have been if they had not pursued their own interest. The
individual pursuit of self-interest can be collectively
self-defeating.
People who commute to work by car face this kind of situation every
day. They would all be better off if, instead of sitting in heavy
traffic, they abandoned their cars and used the buses, which would
then travel swiftly down uncrowded roads. But it is not in the
interests of any individual to switch to the bus, because as long as
most people continue to drive, the buses will be even slower than
cars.
Axelrod is interested in which strategy, of cooperating or not
cooperating, would bring about the best results for parties who face
repeated situations of this type. Should they always cooperate? Should
they always defect, as the non-cooperative strategy suggests? Or
should they adopt some mixed strategy, varying cooperation and
defection in some way? Axelrod invited people to suggest strategies
which would produce the best pay-off for the person using it, if they
were in repeated prisoner's dilemma situations.
When he received the answers, Axelrod ran them against each other on a
computer, in a kind of round-robin tournament in which each strategy
was pitted against every other strategy 200 times. The winner was a
simple strategy called "tit for tat." It opened every encounter with a
new player by cooperating. After that, it simply did whatever the
other player had done the previous time. So if the other cooperated,
it cooperated; and it continued to do so unless the other defected.
Then it defected too, and continued to do so unless the other player
again cooperated. Tit for tat also won a second tournament that
Axelrod organised, even though the people sending in strategies this
time knew that it had won the previous tournament.
Axelrod's results, which have been supported by subsequent work in the
field, can serve as a basis for social planning that should appeal to
the left. Anyone on the left should welcome the fact that the strategy
with the best pay-off always begins with a cooperative move, and is
never the first to abandon the cooperative strategy or seek to exploit
the "niceness" of the other party. But members of the more idealistic
left may regret that tit for tat does not continue to cooperate no
matter what. A left that understands Darwin must realise that this is
essential to its success. By being provokable, tit for tat creates a
virtuous spiral in which life gets harder for cheats, and so there are
fewer of them. In Richard Dawkins' terms, if there are "suckers," then
there will also be "cheats" who can prosper by taking advantage of
them. It is only by refusing to be played for a sucker that tit for
tat can make it possible for cooperators to do better than cheats. A
non-Darwinian left would blame the existence of cheats on poverty, or
a lack of education, or the legacy of reactionary ways of thinking. A
Darwinian left will realise that while all these factors may make a
difference to the level of cheating, the only permanent solution is to
change the pay-offs so that cheats do not prosper.
The question we need to address is: under what conditions will tit for
tat be a successful strategy for everyone to adopt? The first problem
is one of scale. Tit for tat cannot work in a society of strangers who
will never encounter each other again. This is why people living in
big cities do not always show the consideration to each other that is
the norm in rural villages in which people have known each other all
their lives. We need to find structures that can overcome the
anonymity of the huge, highly mobile societies in which we live, and
which show every sign of increasing in size.
The next problem is even more difficult. If nothing you do really
makes much difference to me, tit for tat will not work. So while
equality is not required, too great a disparity in power or wealth
will remove the incentive for mutual cooperation. If you leave a group
of people so far outside the social commonwealth that they have
nothing to contribute to it, you alienate them from the social
practices and institutions of which they are part; and they will
almost certainly become adversaries who pose a threat to those
institutions. The political lesson of 20th century Darwinian thinking
is entirely different from that of 19th century Social Darwinism.
Social Darwinists saw the fact that those who are less fit will fall
by the wayside as nature's way of weeding out the unfit - an
inevitable result of the struggle for existence. To try to overcome it
was futile, if not positively harmful. A Darwinian left which
understands the prerequisites for mutual cooperation and its benefits
would strive to avoid economic conditions that create outcasts.
Let me draw some threads together. What distinguishes a Darwinian left
from previous versions of the left? First, a Darwinian left would not
deny the existence of a human nature, nor insist that human nature is
inherently good, nor infinitely malleable. Second, it would not expect
to end all conflict and strife between human beings. Third, it would
not assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination, prejudice,
oppression or social conditioning. Some will be, but not all. For
example, the fact that there are fewer women chief executives than men
may be due to men being more willing to subordinate their personal
lives and other interests to their career goals; biological
differences between men and women may be a factor in that greater
readiness to sacrifice everything for the sake of getting to the top.
What about those things that a Darwinian left would support? First, it
would recognise that there is such a thing as human nature. It would
seek to find out more about it so that it can be grounded on the best
available evidence of what human beings are. Second, it would expect
that, under many different social and economic systems, many people
will act competitively in order to enhance their own status, gain
power and advance their interests and those of their kin. Third, it
would expect that irrespective of the social and economic system in
which they live, most people will respond positively to invitations to
enter into mutually beneficial forms of cooperation, as long as the
invitations are genuine. Fourth, it would promote structures that
foster cooperation rather than competition, and attempt to channel
competition into socially desirable ends. Fifth, it would recognise
that the way in which we exploit non-human animals is a legacy of a
pre-Darwinian past which exaggerated the gulf between humans and other
animals, and therefore work towards a higher moral status for
non-human animals. Sixth, it would stand by the traditional values of
the left by being on the side of the weak, poor and oppressed, but
think very carefully about what will really work to benefit them.
In some ways, this is a sharply deflated vision of the left, its
utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be
achieved. But in the longer term, we do not know to what extent our
capacity to reason can take us beyond the conventional Darwinian
constraints on the degree of altruism that a society may be able to
foster. We are reasoning beings. Once we start reasoning, we may be
compelled to follow a chain of argument to a conclusion that we did
not anticipate. Reason provides us with the capacity to recognise that
each of us is simply one being among others, all of whom have wants
and needs that matter to them, as our needs and wants matter to us.
Can this insight ever overcome the pull of other elements in our
evolved nature that act against the idea of an impartial concern for
all of our fellow humans, or better still, for all sentient beings?
No less a champion of Darwinian thought than Richard Dawkins holds out
the prospect of "deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure,
disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature,
something that has never existed before in the whole history of the
world." Although "we are built as gene machines," he tells us, "we
have the power to turn against our creators." There is an important
truth here. We are the first generation to understand not only that we
have evolved, but also the mechanisms by which we have evolved. In his
philosophical epic, The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel portrayed the
culmination of history as a state of absolute knowledge, in which the
mind knows itself for what it is, and thus achieves its own freedom.
We don't have to accept Hegel's metaphysics to see that something
similar really has happened in the last 50 years. For the first time
since life emerged from the primeval soup, there are beings who
understand how they have come to be what they are. In a more distant
future we can still barely glimpse, it may turn out to be the
prerequisite for a new kind of freedom: the freedom to shape our genes
so that instead of living in societies constrained by our evolutionary
origins, we can build the kind of society we judge best.=20
--
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