But, from my point of view as a systems designer, I don’t much care about the humanities or whether Wilson is right. I only care about behavior and how it affects society. I am not interested in changing behavior or punishing behavior or… But I am interested in devising a system that will maximize the positive benefits of some behaviors and minimize the negative benefits of other behaviors. With that in mind here my comment on Wilson’s essay:

“Wilson says that there are two kinds of human behaviors: those that favor the success of the individual, and those that favor the success of the group.

‘Do these behaviors exist evenly in each human being? Do we spend our daily lives deciding from moment to moment whether to act in favor of the group or to act in favor of ourselves as individuals? Or does one set of behaviors dominate each of us?
In other words, are there humans who consistently behave selfishly versus other humans who consistently behave in favor of the group?

‘I think that there are two living varieties of Homo sapiens who dominate our societies and cultures. One I call Varietas Tyrannica, the other I call Varietas Democratica. Tyranni compete with democrati in the Darwinian struggle for survival, and this struggle has shaped our history. It can be seen in action at this very moment in Congress.

‘Political behavior is nothing more than Wilson’s theory of multilevel selection at work: group vs. individual. This is the reason that we talk about “bipartisanship.” We recognize the need but we are biologically unable to act rationally without an external force or structure to make us do so.

‘Our society has to undergo another evolution. It has to divide itself into four cooperative generations based on the cycle of life, and it needs to begin to follow another form of evolution: Evolution by Cogitation. We must ponder life objectively and with a purpose—we must extend Wilson’s idea.”

I have been working on the design of a structure and finding ways to give it force. One of the reasons that I keep lurking around your blog is that you write about the first generation in my four-generation plan. You write about humans under age 26.

Completing the humanities would be offering some useful supplement, counterbalance or extension of humanistic thought. That is absolutely not what Wilson is doing.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/the-riddle-of-the-human-species/?ref=opinion

He argues that the humanities have provided an incomplete explanation of humankind and only his theory of multilevel evolution can complete the story.

I read “Consilience” many years ago, and I probably still have it somewhere around here. I enjoyed reading it, but it didn’t move my thinking forward. Over time I followed Wilson’s writing and was convinced that he would wind up where he is today. He probably was just introducing his current book over a period of many years. But his idea that I quoted in a post above is what I had hoped for. I had a similar idea myself developed over many years of dealing with large groups of adults in pressurized situations—their livelihoods were at stake and my actions would, to a large degree, determine their futures, and yet my behavior was based on their behavior. In order to do a better job, I learned to recognize and even anticipate certain behaviors. So, I included my idea in this damned book I talk about all the time, and felt happy to see that someone of Wilson’s authority had blessed it. I suppose that what I have said violates some sort of scholarly creed, and if it does, then I am sorry. But I did write to him and included verifiable proof of my ideas from years past. I never heard from him.

But, his idea is the end of his book. My idea (his idea since he is the authority) is the beginning of my book. I made my living, not from having original ideas, but from implementing someone else’s ideas when no one else could–or had not gotten around to it. My book is about dealing with the relationship between the two kinds of behaviors that I observed and that Wilson describes. And I must say that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and others also described these behaviors and they elevated them to the level that Madison said that the Constitution is primarily a device for dealing with the problem these behaviors produce. The Constitution is a start, but Madison’s system was doomed to failure, he was not a good systems designer. Well, maybe he was really good, but he had run out of time and so he threw something together, and here we are.

So, I have taken Wilson’s idea, Madison’s idea, Washington’s idea, and lots of other ideas, and put them into a system that takes advantage of their strengths and controls their weaknesses. And I am not kidding. So, I guess that I will go ahead and make a fool of myself and publish it. I am so old that the humiliation can’t last too long.

I keep thinking back to that meeting in Germany that we went to where the historians and anthropologists spent the first day complaining about the way that the political scientists and economists systematized and argued from evidence, and the next day they rather justifiably noted that we had our own theories and “hypotheses” that drove us to select sites and subjects of study, it’s just that we adhered to a kind of fiction about when and how those theories had occurred to us–we performed as if they had arisen out of our engagement with a site or an archive or a situation rather than preceded that engagement.

So take this other ‘big idea’ that you like. It absolutely can be a good, interesting way to start with thinking about questions like “what’s the relationship between individuals and groups”. It could also be an interesting basis for an existential, philosophical statement like, “The worst of our behavior and the best of our behavior are inevitable, the human condition is what it is.” There are humanists who arrive at similar conclusions from different starting points.

It’s the in-between that concerns me, and is a typical case of the issue I’m speaking to above. If we could shift this off people for a second, it might be clearer. If an evolutionary biologist said, “natural selection is the fundamental causal explanation for every phenotypic feature we see in living organisms, every behavior, every ecological relationship”, I would say (provisionally), “ok”. What I would say next is, “Ok, take natural selection, start at the beginning of life on Earth, and predict for me every single organism, every single behavior, every single ecology, and every single lived moment that will follow from that causal beginning”.

The evolutionary biologist would now say, “Don’t be an asshole. I can’t do that because there are random events that intervene from that point on: mutations, genetic error and genetic drift, catastrophes. And there are interactions between organisms, environment and genes that produce emergent effects.” I would say, “Ok.” What I would say next is, “But is all of that (natural selection + random events + emergence) sufficient to explain all of the variation we see in organisms, in their behavior, in their interactions, over the entire history of life?”

I think the evolutionary biologist would say, “Yes”. And again I would say, “Ok”. So then I would say, “So if I study the structure of duck penises and vaginas; hairworm parasitism and its effects on grasshopper behavior; or Neanderthal cave paintings, you’re going to come along and say, ‘Great, great, those are great examples of just what I was talking about!'” In other words, none of those things are interesting in and of themselves, and are reducible to being “examples of natural selection”? Most evolutionary biologists would say, “Hey, I’m not being reductive in that way: I’m with you–all of that is interesting to study for itself and of itself.” That there should be such incredible variation and complexity to life, and that the living should experience that complexity as having meaning and mystery is not important: everything is just an example of a hugely abstract and generalized point.

But I think not so with some sociobiologists and other social scientists who use “evolution” as huge cudgel that flattens everything into a reductive little box. Everybody who studies a specific phenomena or moment or episode in this kind of approach is just carrying water for the “big thinker”, just providing him with more examples.

Typically the humanist scholar also adds that consciousness, agency, sentience, etc., adds another degree of contingency and unpredictability, of variation. Mostly Wilson et al dodge that these days via asserting that consciousness is an illusion and that our behavior is entirely driven by our evolutionarily-derived neurobiology. I pointed out in my analysis of Jonathan Haidt a while back that this sort of dodge invariably leaves room for one odd, solitary exception to this assertion: science itself, and scientific thought, is still seen as deriving from a form of rationality that is independent of our neurobiology and having a truth which is not reducible to our evolutionary nature. Music or theater or literature or even politics is “just” evolutionary, but not science. This is to me a really weird and generally unremarked upon disjuncture in Wilson, Haidt, Kahneman, Pinker, etc.–I noticed it with particular sharpness in extreme memeticists like Susan Blackmore. In other words, why isn’t Wilson’s characterization of human nature itself something we are “just” evolutionarily predisposed to believe in?

Once you open that space, there is a lot more that crowds up to come in behind it, all the variation and complexity of human life (and the rest of life) begs to be interesting for its own sake, and to not be easily reducible to some law or principle. I can buy that there is an evolutionary tension between “the group” and “the individual” in human history, but not that the group is always expressed in “honor, virtue and duty” and the individual as “selfishness, cowardice and hypocrisy”.

This is where Wilson et al have too small an imagination and are too quick to look around them now, take stock of their own culture and prejudices, and pronounce them universal. Those words have really specific resonance and meaning in modern and Western societies. I can make work my way to seeing something like “honor” as an issue in most societies across time, but this takes me deep into having to consider semantics, meaning, something that Wilson et al have no time for at all. It’s as if I assembled a word cloud of English words having something to do with violence: war, mayhem, fighting, slapping, fisticuffs, nuked, violation, assault, beaten down, coerced, wrestled, jabbed, intimidated, murdered, and then said, “Oh well, really that all just means violence”. And then compounded that by doing the same to every related word in every related language.

That’s what a humanist would usually be incredibly scrupulous and careful about. If Anthony Appiah sets out to talk about “honor” across time and space, he does a lot of preparatory work in his analysis to assure himself and his readers that the concept has validity in many different concepts AND he pays a tremendous amount of attention to its variation, its complexity, its richness, its meaning. Because that’s both what is required empirically and what is required philosophically. Coming along and saying, “See? I told you, all societies talk about ‘honor’ and that’s because there is group-level selection that is stacked against individual-level selection for selfishness” is bad behavior on multiple levels–it’s not showing respect for how difficult it is to actually prove what the “big thinker” claims to have proven and it’s not showing respect for how interesting the variation and complexity of human experience (or life itself) really is.

“Alleles (the various forms of each gene) that favor survival and reproduction of individual group members at the expense of others are always in conflict with alleles of the same and alleles of other genes favoring altruism and cohesion in determining the survival and reproduction of individuals. Selfishness, cowardice, and unethical competition further the interest of individually selected alleles, while diminishing the proportion of altruistic, group-selected alleles. These destructive propensities are opposed by alleles predisposing individuals toward heroic and altruistic behavior on behalf of members of the same group. Group-selected traits typically take the fiercest degree of resolve during conflicts between rival groups.”

Wilson’s conclusion is that this conflict, this struggle between two kinds of humans, has only one outcome:

“An unavoidable and perpetual war exists between honor, virtue, and duty, the products of group selection, on one side, and selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy, the products of individual selection, on the other side.

… In summary, the human condition is an endemic turmoil rooted in the evolution processes that created us. The worst in our nature coexists with the best, and so it will ever be. To scrub it out, if such were possible, would make us less than human.”

I can think of no better description of our present predicament. The Darwinian struggle has long been with us, and it is reflected in every social institution that civilized man has developed—including all forms of government.

So, Wilson’s idea is a big one, don’t you think? And it can lead to the development of other big ideas, and these ideas could be valid, don’t you think? I suppose I could say that Wilson was just creating a metaphor. Yes, that’s it. I can say that I am just speaking metaphorically rather than scientifically, and I just don’t know the difference. Otherwise I will have to throw away sixty years of data collection and nine years of writing about the ideas that flow from the data—all because of the power of your idea.

Or, as James Madison, “on the other hand,” I could just forget that I read your post.

As for writing the big book on the grand sweep of human events, sometimes I think the problem is simply academic convention. It’s a cliché, I know, but I do think there are some great big – and small – books that could have caught on if they hadn’t been wedded to the sound of their own wonky voice. I know David’s “Debt” is taking a stab at writing in a more direct prose style, and it must mean something to get read (and vilified) in the pages of the Financial Times and Wall St. Journal, as well as the Guardian and The Nation. But what if somebody had bothered to say, (e.g) look, there are a host of endlessly fascinating idiosyncratic, marginal cases he draws on to illustrate his claims, but the big idea of Foucault’s _Discipline and Punish_ is, modern citizens think they’re freer than ever, but that’s only because they have become so effective at constraining themselves and vilifying their enemies that it seems downright enjoyable. Which is how we end up with the eugenics practices in parts of the USA right up until the 1970s, and self-help books for people who worry about their leisure time, and TSA officers with rubber gloves. Here’s a big idea, here are some facts, drawn from far and wide, to demonstrate it. Cool, isn’t it? The other thing is, I think, there really IS a big idea that remains very much a guiding premise of so much human science research and writing (by which I mean the kind of stuff I do and read and teach) which is: Capitalism sucks. Yeah, we want to couch that in a host of contingencies, and recognize those for whom it sucks less, and those for whom it sucks, but not in the ways you’d think it would, and those for whom life goes on even amidst the sucking. But, like those institutions you describe that actually carry weight in and through time and place, capitalism IS kind of a “thing.” Ignore it at your own (publish or) peril.

Here’s what I don’t like, though: particularism. I know that must sound like a very odd thing to say, coming from someone who has insisted both that there are vitally important, consequential differences between witches that turn you into laboring zombies and sorcerers that disinter your grandfather; or mass produced hot dogs and artisanal lunch meats. Yes, I have a thing about particulars, true enough. But I have never once thought the particulars were the point. Or – even worse – that the methodological triumph of social history was the restoration of “voices” to our benighted subjects. Yes, please open your microphones and let a thousand voices bloom, spare me your paltry efforts at analysis. Ack! It’s all very well and good to be attentive to the actual experience, and language, and nuance, and ambiguity of the stuff of living, but if it doesn’t serve to make some kind of claim, then why bother to document it?

Which begs the obvious question, what kind of claim can we make? Or what kind should we want to make? As someone who has occasionally even had things to say about big ideas like “neoliberalism” and “modernity”, both of which I will be only to happy to see heaped on the dustbin of rhetorical strategies, I think it’s incumbent on me to ask: why did I do that? And I don’t think it is wrong to do that, or that it is somehow mistaken to put barbershop murals and structural adjustment programs – or indirect rule – in the same framework. But how do you do that? Or, put differently, what is the systematic observation of and argumentation about human vagaries for? If it’s merely for its own sake because the concreteness of the stories are so compelling, have their own rhythm and poetry and form and allure- which, on a good day, they surely do! – well, then you kind of surrender to particularism. But, for me, at least, the details matter because what I’m really interested in is something else: comparison. How is it possible for a Groundnut Scheme in colonial Tanganyika to be the very paragon of administrative failure, and yet peanuts could be so central to “take-off” in Ghana? Why do Americans drink coffee to speed up and Italians bolt an espresso to help them relax? Why should you only borrow money from your uncle in an Italian-American family, but never borrow money from family if you’re Jewish (don’t ask my wife, and don’t ask me)? I don’t think the answer is – Bingo! Freakonomics! – some unifying human calculus that can explain it all for you! I think it’s that interesting comparisons help us illuminate questions that are worth asking – and always will be because there are no definitive answers. But by looking at observable and enduring differences we can start to draw out patterns that suggest recurring potentials: People don’t just bear offspring, they have kin. When people suffer, they wonder why that happens. People have ideas about how things work, which often make things work the way they think. And more!

In any event, generalization isn’t the way out, but variation actually seems a good notion –and, dare I say it again – fact to think with. Thanks for making me think with it. That could be a good one to sell, too!