Abstract
Simple Minds: The Evolutionary Absolutism of Stephen Pinker
Pinker’s book claims to present a scientific explanation of the history of ‘violence’ from around 8000 BCE. In this book, ‘violence’ embraces an immense number of ontologically different phenomena, from modern warfare and European medieval torture to homicide and corporal punishment. ‘Violence’ is a transcendental quality that is claimed to inhere in Pinker’s idea of ‘human nature’. But in explaining that violence, and its recent decline, through that same ‘human nature’, Pinker affirms in a circular way the precepts he begins with. His explanation is also advocacy for his approved political ideology, a narrow version of liberalism that happens to be hegemonic in the West today. Moreover, an evolutionary psychological association between that liberalism and the greatest ‘intelligence’ manifested by the human species is implicitly claimed. Throughout the book, ideas Pinker likes are elaborated as scientific truths, ideas he dislikes are dismissed as ideology, political correctness or infective memes.
Kant stands in for the constricted understanding of ‘Enlightenment’ that Pinker likes, though his ‘Enlightenment’ is essentially a kind of Burkean conservatism. Hobbes stands in for humanity’s violent ‘nature’ and for an entity, Leviathan, which seems to have no purpose other than to usurp and contain violence. Locke, who influenced the morsels of tolerant liberalism that Pinker approves of, is neglected (unsurprisingly, as he was the author of the idea of the human mind as a blank slate which Pinker has vigorously attacked). Similarly missing is Hegel, though it is difficult to conceive of the modern state without his theoretical influence. It is therefore unclear what Pinker understands by Enlightenment or indeed the philosophers and ideas he uses. Hence, he says that others have wrongly blamed the Enlightenment for the Holocaust. Does he mean Zygmunt Bauman’s argument about modernity? Or is he referring to Adolf Eichmann, who considered Kant’s categorical imperative to be the model for how he conducted his life?
Pinker’s narrative of violence and its decline from the European Middle Ages presents much of the same material as other major histories of violence (the ‘civilising process’, the state’s monopolisation of the means of violence, the decline in spectacular forms of punitive violence). Pinker’s explanations are, however, based on evolutionary psychological and ‘biological’ factors, computational metaphors, and ideas of innate human nature, intelligence, humanism and ‘gentle commerce’. His explanations are dominated by evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics, the latter presented as nature’s truths even though both fields are deeply contested. Biological metaphors are often combined with game theory – especially the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which acts like a sentinel over human history. The dominant understanding of human agency in this book is that of the self-interested, compulsive game addict.
Pinker argues that humanist ideas were largely promoted through technology, mainly the printing press and modern western fiction that enabled ‘us’ to imagine the place of ‘another’. ‘A widening circle’ of sympathy led to a civilising of the innately violent tendencies of humanity outwards from Europe and America. This civilising process is, in essence, the outcome of the cooperation between rational competitors that results from the application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to human nature. The calculus ‘we’ have made over human history regarding violence is described in the language of ‘costs’, ‘payoffs’, ‘trade-offs’, ‘benefits’, ‘free-riders’, ‘motives’, ‘positive sum’, ‘cheaters’, ‘cheater-detection’, ‘mating’ and ‘mate-guarding’. Pinker’s conclusion is a game theoretic one – the Prisoner’s Dilemma will tend to favour decreasing violence. However, re-describing a phenomenon in the language of evolutionary psychology or game theory does not explain it. Similarly, in methodologically flitting from the Old Testament to evolutionary psychology, Homer’s Iliad to behavioural genetics, yet systematically evading controverting evidence, Pinker wants confirmation of his approach at every turn, as if the force of the narrative and the frequent discursive examples that contemplate with the reader what an abstract person might do given a hypothesized situation counts in explaining larger social and historical phenomena.
The book presents a simple, reductionist dogma about ‘human nature’, the latter a cipher for a rendition of the human condition that evolutionary psychology favours. The kind of liberal ‘Enlightenment’ sensibility Pinker promotes reject some visceral forms of hatred and cruelty (and in this sense, the book represents the partial civilising of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology), but without having to commit to the most important political contribution of Enlightenment thinking: the inherent dignity and equality of all human persons. Pinker is equally unsympathetic to explanations based on economic inequality, or complex social, political or economic explanations for violence, war or crime, or using the careful methods of interpretation and re-interpretation that emerge from historical discipline. Nor does he pay much heed to the movements and struggles, often violent, for rights demanded from the state. Violent struggles for civil and political rights in the 1960s are dismissed by Pinker as part of a ‘decivilising’ process, as are 1960s countercultural and anti-war movements (the ones that called for making peace and love, instead of war); indeed, the latter caused increased violence, crime, homicide. Desirable civilisation emerged from the West and colonialism was the civilising gift; when the colonisers left, violent processes of ‘decivilisation’ occurred. It is also argued that non-western migrants to the West have not been fully subject to the civilising process (an ‘incendiary’ issue, he says). Pinker also dismisses ‘anthropologists of peace’ and makes the argument that contemporary native ‘tribes’ are naturally extremely violent – indeed they would have to be among the most violent groups in human history, if his comparative statistics are taken as truth.
It can seem as if rights simply emerged from reading western fiction or ‘widening circles of sympathy’ emanating from Euro-America. One is never sure because for Pinker the actual modern state and its capacities relating to education, welfare, public health and so forth are absent from this book, as is the UN, education, social and economic mobility, national or global institutions, social movements or civil society. His approach favours monistic reduction to individuals (thus National Socialist, Soviet and Chinese communist mass atrocities are the result of the derangement of just three dictators). But groups are also important for Pinker’s narrative. While he does not support ideas of group level selection, in describing the rise of violent Islamism, he makes use of a group explanation in which the perception of kinship is the relevant factor and hence suicide for the kin (umma) is explained. (Suicide, like homosexuality, remains a mystery for those dazzled by evolutionary explanations for human behaviour.) Here, as elsewhere in his book, an example is moulded to fit a protean evolutionary psychological framework that is nimble enough to explain everything.
Evidence is also a highly motile entity in this book. Pinker explains human nature’s aversion to the ‘free-rider’ through a reference to an evolutionary psychological assessment of the Trojan War. The results of fMRI scans that support what he likes are adduced as evidence, but those that do not are dismissed (he ignores the substantial critiques related to what can currently be inferred about human behaviour from neuroscience and fMRI scans). Results of evolutionary psychological experiments that confirm his views are marshalled as evidence, though these experiments are largely undertaken with western, educated, undergraduate students from industrialised, rich and democratic countries (‘WEIRD’ subjects). Pinker states that all psychological traits are heritable (a proportion of the variation between measurable traits between individuals can be accounted for by genetic variation) and that there is an uncontroversial property called general intelligence. He makes great use of twin studies that make unwarranted claims about genetic heritability for a range of social factors. Yet there are substantial, long-standing critiques of behavioural genetics, intelligence testing and general intelligence, and substantial methodological and empirical criticisms of twin studies and ideas of genetic heritability derived from these or other family studies. Nor would a reader think there exist robust scientific criticisms of the idea that all psychological traits are heritable in a genetic sense.
Pinker also makes simply untenable comparisons. He assumes contemporary ‘tribal’ groups are identical in their relevant behaviour with archaic groups that we know about through preserved evidence, though there is no reason to suppose this is the case, nor indeed do we know much about the behaviours of archaic groups. He then assumes we can compare the rates of violent death in archaic groups with, for example, rates of battle death in the Second World War. He is not comparing the same phenomena since the mode, weapons and institutions of violence are conclusively different. Moreover, rates of death in modern war would be lower because of monumental advances in field medicine, especially during the First and Second World Wars, as well as modern medicine and nutrition and other factors. Rates of death in indirect (non-battle related) violence would also be lower for similar reasons. ‘Homicide’ rates would also be expected to be lower for parallel reasons (assuming robust comparisons can be made across centuries). Pinker’s original contribution thus relates to his evolutionary and ‘human nature’ arguments. This book could have been published with those same evolutionary arguments on the eve of the First or Second World War or the Korean War.