On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) (OHN)
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1976) (SB)
The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth by Edward O. Wilson (New York: Norton, 2006) (C)
The Nature of Politics by Roger Masters (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1989) (N)
The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge by Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978) (HS)
From time to time in American history, political scientists have looked to biologyâor what was once called “natural history””âfor insights into politics and political behavior. Thomas Jefferson, for example, once advanced a plan to solve the problem of slavery based upon the “”new”” science of natural history, while several presidents of the American Political Science Association have called upon Darwinian biology to provide the intellectual underpinnings for a new science of politics.1 Despite these early and intermittent efforts, a biological approach to the study of politics has only recently begun to take hold. In the past quarter of a century, political science has witnessed the publication of a spate of books by JAI Press (which is devoted to publishing biopolitical research), the creation of the Center for Biopolitics at Northern Illinois University, the publication of a journal devoted to biopolitical research (Politics and the Life Sciences), and the establishment of a section within the American Political Science Association (the Association for Politics and Life Sciences) devoted to biopolitical scholarship.2
What explains this relatively sudden surge of energy and interest? Dryzek and Schlosberg speculate that the publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson’s book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, struck a responsive chord in political science because sociobiology proved to be compatible with the behavioralism that had been growing in popularity in the discipline since the 1950s. Moreover, Dryzek and Schlosberg add, the “”fading memory of eugenics and Naziism”” has played a role here as well.3 Of course, the cracking of the genetic code in 2001, some six years after Dryzek and Schlosberg published their study, has only intensified this burgeoning interest in biopolitics.
Predictably enough, this interest in exploring the biological roots of politics and political behavior has generated intense opposition. Perhaps the most vocal critics of Darwinian biopolitics have been the postmodernists, continental thinkers devoted to advancing a more hermeneutical approach to knowledge and action. Indeed, it was the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, who first developed a concept of biopolitics that raged against the authoritarian tendencies of modern social science as well as the “”life-destroying”” proclivities of modern governments. Foucault’s influence here has been immense. Thinkers ranging from Gilles Deleuze to Antonio Negri have used Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to advance their own criticisms of modern social science and governmentâespecially American liberalismâsometimes in ways diametrically opposed to Foucault’s. Despite these variations, there is a core meaning to the term “”biopolitics”” in continental philosophy to which most thinkers hew, one that regards the biopolitics of Darwinian social science and American liberalism as anathema.
One need not be a postmodernist to feel some qualms about Darwinian biopolitics. Even among those most enthusiastic about a Darwinian political science there is a lingering uneaseâdiscontent, if you willâabout the moral and political implications of neo-Darwinianism. Pace Dryzek and Schlosberg, some social scientists do worry about Nazism and eugenics, hence their repeated calls for some sort of “”interactionist”” approach to the study of biology and human culture, one that insists on the reciprocal influence of genetic endowment and environmental factors. As Dryzek and Schlosberg hasten to point out, political scientists are split over the merits of sociobiology, an approach that rather aggressively insists that human beings are little more than the playthings of their genes.4
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the limits of a biopolitical approach to political science.5 I argue that the materialist premises of Darwinian biology limit its utility for political knowledge because it denies that human beings have a genuine capacity for what the authors of The Federalist Papers termed “”reflection and choice.”” Because much of postmodernism shares precisely the same materialist premises as neo-Darwinianism, its understanding of biopolitics and “”biopower”” is similarly truncated. As we will see, postmodern biopolitics shares many of the same problems and theoretical conundrums that bedevil Darwinian biopolitics. For that reason, we believe that postmodern biopolitics should be regarded not as an alternative to Darwinian biopolitics but as a variation of it.
These reflections were prompted by the appearance of Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. With the appearance of this little book, Wilson’s thought seems to have come full circle, impaling him on the horns of an intractable dilemma. However, the dilemma that seems to have entrapped Wilson has also ensnared other materialists, continental postmodernists no less than American neo-Darwinians. So long as thinkers remain bound to a strictly materialist understanding of human nature and political action, there will be no relief from the polar extremes to which their thinking inevitably tends.
Darwinian Biopolitical Theory
In American political science, biopolitics seems to be short on definitions but long on creeds, imperatives, and manifestos. Perhaps the most widely circulated biopolitical imperative was drafted by two prominent biopolitical researchers: “”Take TIME, GENES, the BODY, CONSCIOUSNESS, other SPECIES, the ENVIRONMENT, and survival seriously.””6 Although the assertion that one should take “”consciousness”” as seriously as the “”body”” is intended to serve as a hedge against reductionism and “”physicalism,”” the creed from which this one-sentence summary is drawn tilts the balance rather heavily in favor of the very materialism it warns against by insisting that “”there is more continuity than discontinuity between men and other animals”” and that “”the study of politics must reflect that man is an outcome of evolution.””7
Although it is clear that interest in the biopolitical approach is gaining momentum, it is equally clear that biopolitics has not yet attained intellectual liftoff, which is to say that it lacks what Kuhn called “”paradigm status”” or what Lakatos has described as a “”research program.””8 Biopolitics, in other words, does not yet have a well-articulated theoretical framework consisting of what Dryzek and Schlosberg describe as “”a distinct hard core or ontology, a methodology, and an interlocked set of theories.””9 Biopolitical ontology seems to be a relatively simple matter: the biopolitical world is one where individuals struggle for survival and try to maximize “”reproductive success.”” This bare-bones ontology, Dryzek and Schlosberg observe,
permits theories of group selection (selection of traits that benefit the group rather than the individual), Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics . . ., sociobiology’s emphasis on inclusive fitness (i.e., maximization of shared genes in ensuing generations, which need not be transmitted through direct descent), and the interaction of nurture and nature.10
Methodologically, this approach involves “”deduction from the maximization postulate,”” although as Dryzek and Schlosberg hasten to point out, “”observations of animal and human behavior, metaphor and long chains of inference from natural conditions to human community also appear.””11
Given our universal proclivity to maximize reproductive success, biopolitical theories begin from the premise that human beings are far less malleable than cultural relativists and deconstructionists have assumed. The notion that human minds are nothing more than “”blank slates”” shaped and molded by external socio-cultural pressures has been sharply challenged by the findings of evolutionary biology and psychology.12 From a biopolitical perspective, humans are “”hard-wired”” by their genes to learn, communicate, and behave in very specific ways. In other words, as Francis Fukuyama explains, biopolitics begins from the conviction that “”there is . . . such a thing as human nature.””13 Biopolitics thus liberates us from the destructive delusion that we can create a worldâand with it, a human personalityâof our own choosing. The Good News now is that “”the existence of human nature means that cultural and moral relativism needs to be rethought and that it is possible to discern cultural and moral universals that, if used judiciously, might be used to evaluate particular cultural practices.””14 Or, as Larry Arnhart put it, “”Even if the natural world was not made for us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it.””15 Human happiness, then, rests on what Peter Lawler, a critic of Darwinian biopolitics, describes as “”biological enlightenment,”” the realization that we “”should be happy as animals because we can be happy in no other way.””16 Human beings must therefore learn to see certain adaptive behaviors as meaningful and moral for the simple reason that these behaviors comport with their natures.
The most forceful champion of this line of reasoning is, of course, Edward O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology. Wilson’s sociobiology derives unabashedly from a strict, unyielding materialism, the key points of which can be gleaned from Wilson’s books On Human Nature, Consilience,and Sociobiology. Here we read that “”the brain and mind are entirely biological in origin and have been highly structured through evolution by natural selection.”” Although cultures evolve in response to “”environmental and historical contingencies,”” they are “”powerfully guided by the inborn biases of human nature”” (OHN, ixâx). For a biologist, statements such as these are rather unexceptional. What drew the wrath of even fellow biologists was Wilson’s refusal to remain, as he put it, “”chastely on the zoological side of the boundary between the natural sciences and the humanities.”” Here is the paragraph that has drawn so much fire:
Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth. In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology; history, biography, and fiction are the research protocols of human ethology; and anthropology and sociology together constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species. (SB, 271)
“”Yes,”” an unrepentant Wilson has recently written, “”I said that, and I still mean it”” (OHN, xiv). Even after plunging into a renewed reading of a wide range of scholarship on human behavior, a reading occasioned by the furor triggered by Sociobiology, Wilson remains convinced that “”the time has at last arrived to close the famous gap between the two cultures, and that general sociobiology, which is simply the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization, is the appropriate instrument for the effort”” (OHN, xx). This meansâand Wilson has stated as muchâthat all human behavior, including religious belief and moral conviction, are simply so many adaptive survival mechanisms. For him, “”human behaviorâlike the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide itâis the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact.”” Indeed, “”morality has no other demonstrable function”” (OHN, 167).
One of the most striking features of Wilson’s sociobiology is its frank recognition that sociobiological materialism cannot satisfy the deepest longings of human beings for meaning and significance (OHN, 2).17 On the one hand, Wilson clearly believes that the scientific ethos is superior to all others, especially a religious one; he commends “”its repeated triumphs in explaining and controlling the physical world; its self-correcting nature open to all competent to devise and conduct the tests; its readiness to examine all subjects sacred and profane; and now the possibility of explaining traditional religion by the mechanistic models of evolutionary biology”” (OHN, 201). On the other hand, Wilson is clearly aware that scientific materialism is plagued by a sort of “”spiritual weakness.”” The limitation of scientific materialism is the fact that “”while explaining the biological sources of religious emotional strength, it is unable in its present form to draw on them, because the evolutionary epic denies immortality to the individual and divine privilege to the society, and it suggests only an existential meaning for the human species”” (OHN, 192â3). Natural selection, after all, cares not a fig for individuals but only for the species to which the individual belongs.
What, then, may we now hope for? Wilson’s materialism leaves him with twoâand only twoâunhappy alternatives. The first is to envision and embrace a race of “”supermen,”” human beings whose genes have been altered in order to make evolution conscious and willful. “”To chart our destiny,”” Wilson writes, “”means that we must shift from automatic control based on biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge”” (OHN, 6). Our destiny, after all, is to know, “”if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it”” (OHN, 207). Wilson clearly believes that we can liberate ourselves from the forces of natural necessity by scientifically unlocking the secrets of human nature. As Lawler explains it, “”By determining what our genes are, we will be able to change what natural evolution means us to be.“”18
Even for the science-minded Wilson, however, this is a bit unsettling. After all, science and technology clearly have a dark side: what guarantee is there that human nature as it is currently configured will not do even greater damage to itself, or to nature and the environment, in its efforts to carve out a measure of control over the forces of natural necessity?
Thus Wilson’s apparently more restrained alternative, one he has vigorously championed in his most recent works, especially The Creation. This is biophilia, “”the innate tendency to affiliate with life and lifelike processes”” (C, 63). From this perspective, Wilson explains, “”each species, however inconspicuous and humble it may seem to us at the moment, is a masterpiece of biology and well worth saving”” (C, 5). Every species is fitted to play a role in the biosphere; tugging on just one thread of this remarkably sophisticated and delicate “”bioequilibrium”” may result in catastrophe for the entire planet. Although simple prudence dictates that we do everything possible to save our biosphere, Wilson frequently buttresses his appeals to our instinct for self-preservation with ringing outbursts of what can only be described as religious fervor. “”Nature,”” Wilson rapturously declares at one point in his most recent book, “”is a heaven on earth”” (C, 61). Elsewhere he points out that rare animals are important to us because “”we need them as symbols. They proclaim the mystery of the world”” (C, 58). Caught up in the magic and majesty of it all, Wilson even blurts out at one point, “”Please let part of the wolverines stay a mystery!”” (C, 57). Wilson’s apocalyptic rhetoric becomes particularly pronounced when he is condemning our technological overreaching. “”There are words appropriate for artificial biodiversity, even where it exists only in fantasy,”” he thunders, namely, “”desecration, corruption, abomination”” (C, 92). Mankind thus has a role to play in this great, evolutionary drama and it had damn well better learn what its limits are before it is too late. As Wilson put it,
According to the archeological evidence, we strayed from Nature with the beginning of civilization ten thousand years ago. That quantum leap beguiled us with an illusion of freedom from the world that had given us birth. It nourished the belief that the human spirit can be molded into something new to fit changes in the environment and culture, and as a result the timetable of history desynchronized. A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very old species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotions, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its long-term survival. (C, 10)
It is difficult to square sentiments such as these with Wilson’s belief in the liberating power of science. This, then, is our choice: technological hubris or biophilic fatalism, Ăbermensch or ape. Given Wilson’s evolutionary materialism, there can be no other.
Many students of biopolitics wince at all this, finding reductionism not only harsh but unscientific. Roger Masters, one of the most influential scholars writing in the field of biopolitics today, takes direct aim at reductionism when he writes, “”The first requisite for a scientific approach to human nature is . . . willingness to abandon the belief that answers are either/or; our behavior can be both innate and acquired; both selfish and cooperative; both similar to that of other species and uniquely human”” (N, 1). Masters thus sets out in his magisterial book, The Nature of Politics, to construct a non-reductionist but Darwin-friendly political science. “”Rejecting the view that social science will be totally absorbed by (or ‘reduced’ to) biology,”” Masters writes, “”I presume that the behavior of our speciesâwhich Aristotle so accurately termed the ‘political animal’ (zoon politicon)âis in many important respects unique in the natural world”” (N, xiii). Masters’ book is ambitious, attempting as it does to lay the foundations for what he terms a “”naturalist”” approach to human nature and the state, one that will lead toward a better understanding of the operation of bureaucracies, the dynamics of leadership, and the contours of “”natural justice”” (N, xv). Because of its biological erudition, this is a difficult book to get a handle on, as two prominent critics have observed; this is a book of so “”many different themes”” that it is difficult to discern a clear line of argument.19 Nevertheless, if an argument is difficult to locate, there is at least a model of politics and human behavior that Masters is trying to get at, one that incorporates Wilson’s materialism while simultaneously attempting to rise above it.
Masters’ case against reductionism is rather straightforward. Citing an abundance of ethological and neurological evidence, Masters insists that animal behavior cannot always be explained by the genetic traits of individual animals; when placed in different environments, animals of the same species display profoundly different forms of behavior. Thus, he reasons, “”social behavior cannot be reduced to or entirely derived from individual traits without reference to the complex interplay of species and their environments”” (N, 16). The logic of “”complex interplay””âwith its attendant notions of “”multifunctionality”” and “”feedback loops””âis the dominant motif of Masters’ naturalism, distinguishing it from Skinner’s behaviorism and Newtonian mechanicalism. Apparently, both Newton and Skinner were victims of an older view of science, one in which causality was presumed to rule the universe in unequivocal ways. Masters, however, believes that his model of interactionism is truer to the world of quantum mechanics, where indeterminacy reigns. Here, given the complexity and variability of causal relationships, one can only speak of “”probabilities,”” not universal laws.
On the basis of this interactionist logic, Masters then constructs a model for the study of politics that pulls three levels of realityâindividuals, societies, and speciesâinto the same loose orbit. It is important to note that these three levels are distinguished not by a difference in kind or by some sort of essential difference but by a difference in complexity. Each level, Masters, writes, “”is an analytically separable component of a concrete, physical system: the species Homo sapiens on the planet earth, a human population adapted to a particular environment and ecological niche, and a human phenotype with its unique life history”” (N, 133).
What binds these three levels of analysis together is the concept of “”system.”” As Heinz Eulau and Susan Zlomke explained it, “”What evidently joins nature and culture is that both contain as properties ‘systems’ of information that are analogues of each other at different levels of biological-behavioral-social complexity.””20 Masters here enthusiastically embraces Richard Dawkins’ idea of human societies as “”memes,”” the cultural equivalents of genes.21 From this perspective, societies, like genes, transmit information through language, a process that facilitates adaptation and survival. Sociocultural systems thus “”provide a mechanism for transmitting learned responses from one generation to another with sufficient repetition so that relevant experience is not lost, and with sufficient flexibility so that relevant innovations can be adopted”” (N, 79). Therefore, “”human culture is an extraordinarily effective adaptive mechanism because human verbal languages have the capacity to code and transmit information that is of the same order as that of the genes”” (N, 108).
It is important to note that each level of analysis is composed of an “”interacting”” dyad of a physical or material system and “”an information-coding, -processing and -transmission system present in the physical system.””22 The physical component of each system apparently allows each level or system to impinge on the other, while the existence of different information-coding systems permits each level to retain its own singular identity. As Masters explains, “”Each of the less inclusive physical systems must lie with the reaction ranges determined by the higher level, although feedback mechanisms produce evolutionary changes at all levels of both physical and informational systems”” (N, 133). The word deployed by Masters to explain the precise relationship between and among these levels or units of analysis is “”nested””: “”These three levels of information, each corresponding to a different level of the physical system, form a nested series: each human population is part of the species, just as each individual is part of a population”” (N, 133, emphasis added).
There is, we believe, a rather knotty logical problem here, one that causes Masters to stumble through a series of nonsequiturs as he explains the nature of the interconnections within and among these different levels. Although his efforts to transcend reductionism are admirable, it is not clear that they are altogether successful.
Take, firstly, the relationship that is assumed to obtain between the different levels or units of analysis, namely, individuals, societies, and species. As Eulau and Zlomke have observed, what apparently binds nature and culture into a coherent, functioning whole here is the notion of system.23 Nature and culture are presumed to “”contain as properties ‘systems’ of information that are analogues of each other at different levels of biological-behavioral-social complexity.””24 By advancing the idea of a system, Masters hopes to avoid naĂŻve reductionism. How, exactly, does Masters overcome it? Easy, Eulau and Zlomke point out, “”He proceeds by analogy.”” Masters repeatedly makes statements like the following: “”Culture and tradition, like genetic inheritance, is a means of storing, processing, and transmitting information concerning adaptive responses to varied contingencies”” (N, 132, emphasis added). But as Eulau and Zlomke ask, what do words like “”like”” really mean here in the first place? Are they meant to convey mere similarity or are something stronger, such as equivalence? “”Are the constraints of social roles and norms really analogous to the constraints imposed by particular genes on the phenotype,”” Eulau and Zlomke wonder, “”and are the functions of culture or tradition really analogous to the functions performed by the gene pool for the species?””25
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The concept of “”system”” allows Masters to insist that these three levels of analysis form a “”nested”” set. Now, these three levels or units of analysis are constituted by systems of individual learning and memory, the cultures and traditions of societies, and the gene pool of the species. But what, Eulau and Zlomke ask, is “”nested”” in what? Nesting, it seems, is as much a metaphor or analogue as a system. To illustrate how these systems are combined into a nested whole, Masters writes that “”cultural norms must lie within the potentialities of the human gene pool, just as individual learning must lie within the potentialities of the individual’s culture”” (N, 133). However, anxious to avoid the appearance of reductionism, Masters immediately adds, “”Yet neither cultural norms nor individual learning can be simply reduced to the information coded in the human chromosomes, for both a verbal language and the central nervous system can function within limits as autonomous, open information systems”” (N, 133). If these levels or systems are autonomous, what then is the precise character of the information system that supposedly binds them together? More to the point, exactly what is information? Is it a material property, as Eulau seems to think, or is it something altogether different?26
Masters is not clear on this crucial point. On the one hand, he concedes that reduction is possible, which is the whole point of the nesting metaphor as Eulau and Zlomke, avowed reductionists, almost gleefully point out. On the other hand, however, Masters makes this rather striking statement:
While adaptation to the environment is one of the factors in evolution, other characteristics of population genetics are due to genetic drift, sampling, and genomic structureâattributes of the informational system for transmitting genetic information, rather than of the material environment per se. Treating the gene pool as a constituent element of living forms is hardly mysticism, but it limits the scope of the mechanistic causation emphasized by traditional materialists. (N, 143â4)
Elsewhere, Masters adds that his anti-reductionism makes his biological model compatible with Aristotelian teleology because, at one level, “”causation can be called formal because it concerns the genetic information controlling the material processes of growth, development, and behavior”” (N, 144, emphasis added). Whatever else “”genetic information”” is, then, it apparently is not made of any sort of material stuff.
But if information is “”not-matter,”” if it is in fact meaning of a sort as the above statements suggest, just where did it come from? The materialist assumption has it that the constituent elements of living things are simply inorganic matter. But recent advances in molecular biology have demonstrated that the building blocks of life, proteins, do not seem to be explicable by either chance or the laws of natural selection because incomprehensibly complicated instructions are required to create even simple functioning proteins.27 We are not asking here how different kinds of information interact across different systemic boundaries, as Eulau does. Rather, we are asking how Masters accounts for the relation between information and its material environment within a given system. Given his evolutionary naturalism, Masters finds himself in a rather tight theoretical spot. He has no other choice but to insist either that causal, material processes are capable of creating organisms of almost unimaginable complexityâto wit, proteins and their informational coding systemsâor to believe that meaning has somehow co-existed all along with matter, in which case Darwinian naturalism seems to be rather beside the point. There is a third possibility, however, for which Masters frequently opts: that informational systems of any sort are only “”partially”” caused by the material forces of their systemic environments. This seems to be what Masters means when he declares that cultural norms must lie within the potentialities of the human gene pool while simultaneously insisting that language and the central nervous system function as “”autonomous, open information systems.”” This solution, however, is more apparent than real: how a given property like mind or meaning can be at one and the same time caused by and independent of another property like matter is left for the reader to imagine.
Masters’ evolutionary naturalism does no better when deployed to solve some of the problems addressed in another large block of biopolitical issues, namely, natural justice. Anxious to distinguish Darwinian naturalism from a never-ending war of all against all, Masters argues that the “”new naturalism”” in fact supports three core principles of liberalism: “”respect for human individuality and cultural difference; the duties of virtue entailed by social obligation; and the concern for human justice”” (N, 228). Here Masters is able to generate a certain measure of decency and sociability on the basis of his interactionism, arguing that nature itself has made human beings self-regarding and sociable, cooperative as well as competitive. A healthy respect for others is inherent in Darwinian naturalism, according to Masters. After all, who knows which of us “”carries a mutant gene that is a valuable adaptation to a future environment and will someday spread throughout the human gene pool”” (N, 228)? Because “”nothing is more threatening to the survival of a species than the disappearance of naturally occurring genetic variation,”” virtues like tolerance and respect for cultural diversity enhance genetic fitness (N, 229).
It bears emphasizing that ethical standards are not derived from some transcendent norm or rational hierarchy of ends here; natural justice takes its bearings strictly from the biologically propelled, naturally evolved desires of human beings. Right and wrong are thus a matter of scope and intensity, not one of inherent goodness. As Carson Holloway has suggested, Masters’ naturalism “”is guided by a concern with the quantity of pleasure enjoyed in life: the moral life is finally justified because it results in more satisfaction than the alternative.””28 From this perspective, the odiousness of Hitler’s “”final solution”” consists in its scale: “”Even though it is true that extinction is a natural event,”” Master declares, “”humans who take the fate of populationsâor of the entire speciesâinto their own hands know not what they do. Nuclear war and other uses of industrial technology that create hitherto inconceivable horror may be possible; such means of securing political advantage cannot be just”” (N, 233). Elsewhere Masters writes that “”genocide and attempted genocide, using the power of the state as a means to destroy masses of humans, is naturally unjust”” (N, 232).29
By weaving social cooperation into biological necessity, Masters is attempting to soften the traditional criticism of Darwinism, namely, that the morally right is merely the biologically necessary. This does not, Masters acknowledges, undo all of Darwinism’s ethical knots, but it works out enough of them to allow Darwinian naturalism to serve as the basis of a decent and humane social order. Much like Machiavelli, Masters insists on a lowered standard of moral judgment, one located somewhere between relativism and dogmatism. This is what he terms “”relative objectivity”” (N, 243). In contemporary physics, Master argues, no measurement is true in the abstract, or at least without reference to the point in space and time from which measurements or observations were made. This, he maintains, is not rank relativism: “”In the sciences, objectivity can be attained only by abandoning the pretense that a human can be in the position of a divine observer whose judgments are true without qualifications of time and space”” (N, 244). As in physics, so too in moral reasoning: “”Truths that depend on time and context are nonetheless truths”” (N, 244). This is not much to go on, Masters concedes, but it is at least something. In the end, he shrugs, “”standards of natural justice are probably most useful in identifying injustice”” (N, 232).
Nevertheless, this still may be conceding too much to historicism, even for Masters. After all, allowing full rein to both cooperation and competitiveness in human affairs still amounts to insisting that whatever is, is right (N, 238). “”Were humans not endowed with such complex central nervous systems, permitting the most diverse responses to identical situations,”” Masters reasons, “”this objection might have force”” (N, 238). However, the fact that human beings “”are all too liable to mistake their own self-interest, committing folly and wickedness on a scale unknown to other species,”” testifies to a certain measure of freedom (N, 238). This does not mean that our “”hypercomplexity”” or the fact that human beings “”have emancipated themselves from the instinctive or mechanical causes found in other species”” renders nature unfit to serve as a standard for moral judgment. That is, in fact, the mistake nihilists and relativists have made. Rather, Masters is trying to stake out a middle way here, one that comports with our inward sense that human freedom is real but limited.
However, it is apparently far easier for Masters to imagine the existence of a middle ground than to call one into existence. The problem revolves around the notion of human “”hypercomplexity.”” On the one hand, our hypercomplexity seems to consist of a complex, heterogeneous totality of material and intentional factors. This is underscored in the following paragraph, which must be quoted in full:
Humans manipulate [their] repertoire of social possibilities by means of a dual transformation of the cost-benefit calculus observed in animal behavior. At the individual level, the assessment of the interpersonal situation is transformedâusually in a conscious way but sometimes through repression or self-deceptionâinto a subjective motive. These psychological responses are further molded into sociocultural institutions, which, while superficially associated with a corresponding psychological motive, actually use diverse assessments of the world. Since each biological situation can generate any of the five motivational responses and each of the individual motives can produce behaviors at any of the five institutional levels, a reductionist science of human behavior is highly improbable if not impossible. (N, 162, emphasis added)
From this perspective, given the heterogeneity of hypercomplexity, there is a “”break”” or a “”gap”” between freedom and necessity that creates the possibility of genuine moral choice. However, Masters reverses course rather dramatically and unexpectedly at times, insisting at one point that “”as more is learned in ecology, neurobiology, and molecular genetics, the presumption that human behavior is uncaused or controlled by free will becomes less and less tenable“” (N, 237, emphasis added).
The same logical difficulties that plague Masters’ treatment of human nature and politics thus plague his discussion of moral reasoning. The problem is that freedom and intentionality are apparently emergent properties of necessity, which means that they areâsomehowâat one and the same time determined by and independent of material causality. Throughout Human Nature and Politics, Masters repeatedly falls rather heavily between the stools, unable to reconcile his insistence on the organic unity of all living things with his belief in the irreducibility of human freedom. It may be that interactionism allows for a more theoretically complete and humane approach to politics than does raw reductionism. However, the price of this moderation, at least for Masters, is high. Until he solves the logical conundrum at the heart of his categorical framework, Masters will be forced to pay for his apparent moderation in the coin of logical coherence.
Darwinian Biopolitics, the State, and Biopolitical Expertise
As Meyer-Emerick points out, Darwinian biopolitics offers no agenda for practice.30 It does, however, offer some justification for certain institutions and political behaviors. There are a growing number of theorists, for example, who see the institutions of liberal democracyâthe rule of law, private property, and monogamous familiesâas rooted in human nature.31 Others believe that a biologically informed theory of human nature can also fruitfully commend at least a certain orientation, if not a specific agenda, in foreign policy, one generally consistent with Hans Morgenthau’s Realpolitik.32
In this context the Darwinian explanation for the state and bureaucracy is of particular interest to us. Although many neo-Darwinians believe that we have a genetic disposition towards the practice of dominance and submissionâand are therefore naturally inclined to create hierarchies of powerâthe existence of large-scale organizations like states is difficult to explain biologically.33 The reason is that mutual benefit is difficult to discern once we advance beyond face-to-face relationships. Helping behavior, as we have seen, can be adaptive, but only for kin (they carry our genes) and for those in small groups who can directly benefit from the practice of mutual reciprocity. In explaining the origins of the state, the evolutionary mystery is why we sacrifice for complete genetic strangers, especially for those non-kin in positions of power; after all, government officials gain disproportionately from our sacrifice (in the form of taxes, government regulation, and military service) (N, 157â60).
According to Masters, the answer lies primarily in the fact of interactionism: “”Biology now teaches us that the existence and structure of social groups varies, even within a single species, as a consequence of the interaction between animals and their environment”” (N, 160). We need not posit that human beings are either inherently selfish or innately virtuous in order to account for the creation of the state; instead, inclusive fitness theory maintains that the costs and benefits of different types of behavior will vary depending on ecological circumstance and certain biological givens such as age or sex. Secondly, with the help of game theory, Masters then projects scenarios in which all players benefit from coercion, even though some will inevitably and necessarily benefit more than others. From this perspective, individuals can benefit from the creation of large communities like the state only by accepting the risk that those with power will gain disproportionately from their roles as enforcers. “”Governments can thus be described as providing the service of coordinating social behavior, exacting a ‘side-payment’ for protecting the collective goods.”” Moreoverâand this is the key pointâonce instituted, “”such institutions can create considerable mutual benefit for all members as long as obedience to social rules prevents a Tragedy of the Commons”” (N, 172).
This, of course, raises a crucial question: Is one regime preferable to the others? Constitutional democracy, it seems, has its advantages; it allows for dissent, exit, or displays of regime support to a degree unmatched by any other form of government. However, Masters’ support for democracy is so heavily qualified that in the end constitutional democracy seems to be simply one possible choice among many. This is because “”the imposition of abstract norms without regard to circumstances is naturally unjust,”” and insofar as it is impossible “”to define a norm of behavior without reference to circumstance . . . ethical abstractions can ultimately enshrine parochial customs and interests in a rationalist garb”” (N, 242). Indeed, Masters has rather harsh words for those who would ground constitutional democracy in natural right. What many believe to be natural or human rights, rights on which the legitimacy of the state is based, are in fact simply “”social institutions whose current form was influenced by and depends upon the centralized state”” (N, 181). “”The extension of evolutionary principles to human life,”” Masters declares, “”unlike the seventeenth-century teachings of natural right, is thus not restricted to equal ‘rights to life, liberty, and estate’âabstract claims that produce social conflict without providing natural grounds for self-restraint in the exploitation of either the physical environment or other peoples.”” After all, the natural rights doctrines of Hobbes and Locke gave rise to colonialism and the destruction of natural resources. Indeed, Masters intones, “”In the name of these principles, the vast majority of the indigenous population of North America was subjected to virtual genocide”” (N, 231). Thus it is, Masters concludes, that there is no “”best”” regime because regimes simply cannot be divorced from circumstances “”any more than the question of what is or is not healthy food or exercise can be defined abstractly for all humans in all environments”” (N, 232).
By emphasizing the power of circumstance and by apparently making the heritage of each society both the cause and measure of its regime, Masters is suggesting that all is as it has to beâor nearly so. Although interactionism allows for an element of indeterminacy, it nevertheless denies human beings the freedom to make fundamental choices, as evinced by Masters’ willingness to entertain “”as a general rule”” the notion that “”the latent functions of human behavior are always more important than the manifest or intended functions”” (N, 131). Because instinct trumps choice, Masters’ relativism seemingly ends in a variation on what Tocqueville described as the “”traditionalist”” approach to government, whereby “”each nation is inexorably bound by its position, origin, antecedents and nature to a fixed destiny which no effort can change . . . [It is] the product of preexisting facts, of race, or soil, or climate.””34 John Stuart Mill offered another classic formulation of traditionalism, which also captures Masters’ logic rather neatly: “”[Governments] are a sort of organic growth from the nature and life of that people: a product of their habits, instincts and unconscious wants and desires, scarcely of their deliberate purposes.””35
Somit and Peterson go even further. Unlike Masters, they believe that hierarchy and domination are more deeply ingrained in human behavior than mutuality and reciprocity. For them, all primates have a predisposition for hierarchy because hierarchy is adaptively more beneficial than equality: “”Dominance furthers predictability and predictability, in turn, benefits both the dominant and the subordinate.””36 Those who dominate gain desired resources, while subordinates, by yielding, avoid a confrontation that might otherwise reduce or even terminate their reproductive possibilities. Hierarchy is thus conducive to social stability, a condition that is reproductively more beneficial than chaos or instability.
What attenuates our natural reflex for hierarchy, however, is our capacity for what Somit and Peterson term “”indoctrinability.”” Homo sapiens, they argue, “”is the only species capable of creating and, under some circumstances, acting in accordance with cultural beliefs that run counter to its innate behavioral tendencies.””37 Because democracy is biologically unnatural, it is difficult to create and even harder to sustain. Its best hope for survival, even here in the United States, is for public schools to capitalize on our innate indoctrinability and double down on the teaching of civics and American government. We need to impress upon young minds the fact that democracy is a fragile form of government, Somit and Peterson argue, one that demands constant nurture and sacrifice. They then end their book with this ringing declaration: “”Can we design and carry out a national policy of effective civic education? In all candor, we do not know. But that is really not the key question. What we must ask is this: If American democracy is to be preserved, do we have any choice other than to make the attempt?””38
What Somit and Peterson nowhere explain, however, is why we should bother with that attempt in the first place. After all, if hierarchy is natural and more conducive to stability and happiness, then what, really, is the point of democracy? Why struggle to keep alive a form of government that cuts against the biological grain? Remarkably enough, Somit seems to concede the point, insisting that democracy is, even on intellectual grounds, hardly worth the trouble. In his essay, “”Democratic Philosophy: An Endangered Species,””39 Somit observes that democratic philosophy is difficult to defend not only biologically but philosophically as well. “”The democratic philosophy is logically defective,”” Somit argues, “”for its rests on two basically incompatible values, equality and liberty.””40 Indeed, after reviewing a wide range of definitions and defenses of democracy, Somit simply shrugs and concludes that the case for democracy “”must rest on faith.””41 Like Marxism, democracy is fundamentally inconsistent and incoherent. However, therein lies its strength and secret power: democracy means whatever its proponents want it to mean, and smart, effective leadership should learn to capitalize on that fact. In the meantime, “”social engineers”” should concentrate their efforts on improving “”the actual workings of democratic governments, so as to demonstrate more persuasively that governments can deliver . . . the benefits promised by democratic theory.””42
Of all the ideas that seize hold of the social scientific imagination from time to time, few are as unsettling as this one. Somit’s hope that social engineers, armed with the “”science”” of natural human hierarchy, might someday be loosed to repair malfunctioning governmental machinery is rather troubling, to say the least. Given the number of pressing problems in areas ranging from public health to the environment, there is indeed a legitimate case to be made for the inclusion of biological expertise in public policymaking.43 However, no less a figure than Harold Lasswell has warned of the threat to public well-being posed by leadership elites possessed of the (biological) will and the scientific resources to maintain their position of dominance. In an essay that predates Somit and Peterson’s idea of “”indoctrinability”” by some fifty years, Lasswell mused that, “”under continued provocation,”” leadership elites may someday be pushed to devise “”extreme and dangerous strategies”” to counteract what he called the “”universalizing and diversifying effects of communication,”” or those communications serving to undermine public support for a given regime. “”Symbolic indoctrination may itself be given up as the principal means of stabilizing systems of public order,”” Lasswell declared. “”Chemical and biological warfare can be waged upon dissenters whose capacity for feeling or expressing opposition would be permanently crippled.”” This is what Lasswell termed “”the somatization of acquiescence.”” “”It is not demagoguery,”” he wrote; “”rather, it is somatarchy, or rule by biochemicals in place of the manipulation of sign and symbol.””44
Lasswell’s grim foreboding warns us not only of governments that have grown too great but of citizenries that have grown too weak by passively allowing leadership elites to grow to unhealthy dimensions in the first place. And therein lies what is perhaps the fundamental weakness of Darwinian biopolitics: it cultivates an enervating fatalism. It is important to recognize that Masters and Somit represent different forms of biologism here. For Somit and Peterson, human beings are simply swept up by general biological forces beyond their control, a doctrine that renders genuine knowledge and choice meaningless. As Alexis de Tocqueville has argued, if the search for the causes of human behavior ends by positing the source of action not in the wills of specific individuals but in mankind as a whole, or in some immanent force in natureâsuch as the species or historyâthen, as James Ceaser has written, “”power lies with no one in particular and hence with an invisible system that operates on all.””45 Under this condition, with vast, overarching forces of biological necessity thought to be controlling their destinies, “”people lose all will to assert themselves, and they become weak and phlegmatic.””46 In this way, Tocqueville believed, a populace loses its liberty.
Masters, however, is beset by a different problem that nonetheless leads to the same general outcome. For him, biological necessity is refracted through the concrete circumstances of space and time, allowing for a measure of indeterminacy. Although Masters’ interactionism preserves a degree of unpredictability and diversity among different groups and forms of government, his brand of relativism is no less hostile to individual choice than Somit’s. In the end, the margin of freedom Masters allots to individuals is so severely circumscribed by their situation that the best we can do is to modify a government according to the standards that arise from understanding a nation’s peculiar circumstance, what an older tradition of political thought would have referred to as a nation’s peculiar “”genius.”” Because instinct overrides intention, choice, as we have seen, cannot extend to the pursuit of fundamentally different alternatives or political regimes.
Masters, Somit, and Peterson, then, tend to different varieties of fatalism, but to fatalism all the same. Even though Masters declares that no state has the right to make unqualified or unreasonable demands on a people, and that a people in its turn has the right to resist such demands, he makes resistance infinitely more difficult than it already is by repeatedly insisting that so many good thingsâalmost all good things, reallyâare owed to the existence of state power and to the overweening ambition of those who are driven by the (biological) will to lead. Moreover, Masters defends tolerance and diversity on the basis of what is at root a rather chilling utilitarianism. His insistence that we should cultivate an ethic of tolerance and diversity because we can never be quite certain of who might be carrying a beneficially mutant gene overlooks the simple fact that in many cases we often do know who does not carry such genes,namely, the aged, the sick, and the infirm. Are the ethical injunctions to protect them a matter of biological circumstance, too?
In contrast to a scientific ethos that marginalizes certain groups, the broad, disparate movement of postmodernism boasts of an ethic that celebrates them all. Postmodernism claims to have revitalized and “”valorized”” the ideals of diversity and diffĂ©rance, ideals that postmodernists believe have come under siege from the exclusionary practices of reason. Because postmodernism so vigorously protests against the leveling, homogenizing force of science, many see postmodernism as the foilâthe archenemy, reallyâof Darwinian biopolitics. There is, in fact, a good bit of truth to this view. As we will see, the very notion of “”biopower”” as deployed by some postmodernists is intended to expose and sabotage the sort of Darwinian biopolitics advanced by Wilson, Masters, and Somit. Nevertheless, we believe that there are remarkable similarities between the two schools as well; at some point, in fact, both Darwinians and postmodernists may suffer the shock of mutual recognition, a moment that would justly confirm the old adage, les extrĂȘmes se touchent.
With that, let us now enter the strange and tormented world of Michel Foucault, one of postmodernism’s most celebrated thinkers.
Biopower and Postmodernism
In his monumental study The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault rather abruptly injects a brief analysis of political power into his analysis of the emergence of the modern self as subject. Sifting through the forms and historical causes of modernity, Foucault had noticed a shift in language during the Renaissance away from juridical discussions of state sovereignty and “”princely power”” to administrative disquisitions on the “”art of government.”” This new approach set for itself the task of explaining not just how to defend and rule a given territory but how to organize it in order to better control it. As Foucault explained, “”The art of government . . . is [now] concerned with . . . how to introduce economy, that is the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family . . . [or] how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family, into the management of the state.””47 Thus, Foucault argued that a new political rationality was born, one that introduced economy and control from the top down, resulting in what Foucault termed new “”individualizing”” and “”totalizing”” forms of power. “”Never in the history of human societies,”” he wrote, “”even in the old Chinese society . . ., has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures.””48 Taken together, these new techniques and procedures constitute an altogether new form of power, one which Foucault called “”biopower.””
Biopower, Foucault explained, “”brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of the transformation of life . . ., modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question”” (HS, 143). Sovereigns have always had the power to decide matters of life and death; however, with the advent of modernity, power does not simply check, constrain, or destroy but is now “”transformed into the regulatory power to manage life.””49 As Foucault put it, this new form of power seeks to superintend life, “”to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations”” (HS, 137). As a “”totalizing procedure,”” biopolitics takes as its object whole populations, analyzing them with scientific instruments like demography, epidemiology, statistics, and urban planning. “”For the first time in history,”” Rabinow writes, “”scientific categories (species, population, fertility, and so forth), rather than juridical ones become the object of systematic, sustained political attention and intervention.””50 Moreover, in order for biopower to be deployed effectively, “”security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to . . . optimise a state of life.””51
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The other pole of biopolitics, namely, individualization techniques, takes the individual body as its object, regarding it as little more than a biological mass to be prodded and manipulated. This is the realm of “”disciplinary technologies”” or the “”technologies of power.”” The point of these technologies, Foucault explained, is to create “”a docile body that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.””52 As Rabinow explains it, this form of biopolitical discipline proceeds by assembling individuals in some sort of rationalized space: “”Once established, this grid permits the sure distribution of the individuals who are to be disciplined and supervised. In a factory, the procedure facilitates productivity; in a school, it assures orderly behavior; in a town, it reduces the risk of dangerous crowds, wandering vagabonds, or epidemic diseases.””53 Whether individualized or totalized, biopower can thus be defined as “”a power of regularisation designed to optimise the socio-biological capacities of a living multiplicity of human beings.””54
It is important to understand that biopower is only one aspect or dimension of what Foucault called the “”power/knowledge”” relation, a construct that is at the heart of his entire system of thought. Like all postmodernists, Foucault rejected the simple equation of knowledge, freedom and progress, repeatedly insisting that the will to power lurks just beneath the surface of the will to truth. LĂ©vi-Strauss spoke to this postmodernist “”suspicion”” when he remarked during an interview late in his life that “”all the tragedies we have lived through, first with colonialism, then with fascism, then the concentration camps, all this has taken shape not in opposition to or in contradiction with so-called humanism . . . but I would say almost as its natural continuation.””55 Making much the same point, Foucault sharpened LĂ©vi-Strauss with a bit of Nietzsche: “”All knowledge,”” he wrote, “”rests upon injustice; (that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).””56 From this perspective, power is simply the dark underbelly of truth; conversely, truth, in the words of one commentator, is simply “”the disguised emissary of power.””57 Given this, reason offers no authority, no external position of certainty from which to survey power relations in order that we may be rid of them or somehow rise above them. Reason is unable to liberate us from the subterranean underworld of dominance and control for the simple reason that reason is, at least to some degree, made of the selfsame stuff.
Biopolitics, then, is the most current manifestation of the eternal will to power. Before we pass to the issue of how we should (or even can) live in this biopolitical age, we need to place Foucault’s biopolitical judgments in two larger contexts, namely, his materialism and his determinism. Both have a direct bearing on the sort of practical and ethical judgments that Foucault allows for in a biopolitical world.
At bottom, biopower is for Foucault what it is for Darwinians like Wilson, namely, a strictly material phenomenon.58 To Foucault’s way of thinking, there is nothing behind or beyond this world, nothing resembling a “”form”” or an “”absolute spirit”” or even, as we will see, an independent “”self”” that gives meaning or progressive direction to human history. Throughout his life, Rabinow relates, Foucault’s aim was “”to avoid analyses of discourse or ideology as reflections, no matter how sophisticatedly mediated, of something supposedly ‘deeper’ and more ‘real.’ “” In this sense, at least, Foucault has been “”consistently materialist.””59
This is not to say that Foucault’s materialism is without its complications. In the earliest phase of his academic life, for example, Foucault explored the nature of the ensembles or “”discursive structures”” that constitute the various social sciences’ subjective schemes of meaning. Unlike structural theory, Best and Kellner explain, Foucault’s historical analyses refused to treat these meaning schemes as universal, eternal, and immutable. Rather, these rules were what Foucault considered to be the historical conditions of knowledge, “”cultural codes”” that, when taken together, constituted the episteme or “”configuration of knowledge”” determining “”the empirical orders and social practices of a given way of life.””60 It is important to note that Foucault’s methodâwhat he called “”archeology””âdid not simply dissolve all structures into some seamless flux of linguistic signification.61 Instead, his method enabled him to break up and reconfigure the rules and ensembles of social life in order to see which ones could be theoretically affirmed and which could be dispensed with. The task of archeology, in short, is to reconstruct social wholes and trace their interrelations, not to deconstruct them into syntactic nothingness.62 Some social ensembles may be ambiguous, insubstantial, and short-lived, but they are not, for all that, any less real.
Commentators, however, have been at odds over how to square Foucault’s early interest in archeology with his later devotion to “”genealogy,”” the analysis of how archeological structures come to be. Because Foucault conceived and understood genealogy in much the same manner as Nietzsche did, namely, as the linking of social wholes and discursive practices to power, his method implies that these wholes and practices are simply derivative realities that have no real logic or identity of their own. In shifting to genealogical studies, Kellner and Best explain, Foucault placed “”more emphasis on the material conditions of discourse, which he defines in terms of ‘institutions, political events, economic practices and processes’ and on analyzing the relations between discursive and non-discursive domains.”” This transition, then, should not be interpreted to mean that a new, materialist Foucault emerged to break free of the old, idealist one. Rather, Foucault’s development of a genealogical method “”marks a more adequate thematization of social practices and power relations that were implicit in his work all along.””63 Thus, “”where archeology criticized the human sciences as being grounded in humanist assumptions genealogy links these theories to the operations of power and tries to put historical knowledge to work in local struggles.””64 Or, as Rabinow claimed, the archeological Foucault was simply experimenting, seeking to discover just how much autonomy could be claimed for discursive realities in the first place. In fact, Rabinow simply tries to shrug off the whole issue as inconsequential; Foucault’s genealogy simply “”widened his analysis to show how these disciplines have played an effective part in a historical field that includes other types of nondiscursive practice.””65
What Rabinow does not address is how a system of signification can be accorded any autonomy within a system reckoned to be thoroughly materialistic from the outset. Where, in other words, does our capacity for logic and reason come from? If discursive practicesâespecially those of the so-called “”hard”” sciencesâcannot be traced back to a material substratum or to a localized struggle for power, then how are they possible at all?66 Foucault is plagued here by precisely the same problem that plagued Mastersâbeginning from a strictly materialist premise, Foucault can no more account for ideal, intentional, or logical properties than could Masters.67