Abstract
Are the concepts of the state of nature and the social contract still relevant for contemporary political theory? I argue that these ideas from early modern and Enlightenment political theory can be fruitfully reapplied via the data and methods of evolutionary biology. Alignment of evolutionary theory with social contract theory can answer the charge that Darwinism, however accurate its picture of the natural world or natural history, provides no defensible grounding for ethics or politics. The implications of the biosocial contract for political economy are far-reaching, with Rousseau’s insistence that ‘all have something and none has too much of anything’ gaining biological and evolutionary confirmation. Republicanism refracted through Darwinism telescopes freedom as non-domination back to the very biological origins of human politics. Such naturalization suggests translating the Rawlsian imperative to reconcile self-interest and social cooperation into the related Darwinian imperative to use the public sphere to end irrational and destructive arms races.
Darwinian political theory has enjoyed a resurgence in recent decades, but its major proponents argue that the evolutionary world-picture refutes modern social contract theory and sanctions a return to Aristotelian ideals (see Arnhart, 1984, 1990, 1994a, 1994b, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2005, 2010; Masters, 1975, 1981, 1989, 1990). This article, by contrast, establishes a framework for Darwinian political theory I call the ‘biosocial contract’. 1 The social contract aspect builds off of Hobbes, Spinoza and Rousseau. We bind ourselves to a political order that is neither reason’s transcendence of nature nor the result of a natural process unfolding behind our backs. Instead, humans can collectively use our best anthropological knowledge to maximize flourishing by institutionally activating cooperative and egalitarian instincts while taming hierarchical and centrifugal ones. To this end, I suggest restoring the state of nature to social contract theory as a living, breathing presence, and not just a stylized instrument for producing theories of justice or demonstrating Pareto-optimality. Darwinism allows more justifiable confidence about this state of nature than was available to Rousseau’s speculative Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men or Second Discourse (1755; citations using the page number only are from Rousseau, 1997a).
Part 1 argues that contemporary contractarianism’s major inadequacy is not its adherence to an impoverished Enlightenment liberal-individualist model, as is often alleged. Rather, the problem is that it has (for the most part) abandoned Enlightenment social and political anthropology. So I read Rousseau’s work as a prototype for naturalistic social contract theory (section 1.1). Enlightenment ‘human science’ was inchoate then and remains provisional now, but Darwinism clearly advances it, substituting the environment of evolutionary adaptedness or EEA (Bowlby, 1969–1980) for Enlightenment devices like Rousseau’s conjectural state of nature or Hume’s circumstances of justice. The EEA describes two overlapping processes in the present study: the thousands of human generations spent in small gatherer-hunter groups prior to the spread of agriculture, and the primate evolutionary history in which land-dwelling apes descended from tree-dwelling monkeys. Evolutionary psychology claims that the human brain, like the human body, was enduringly shaped by the selection pressures faced during evolution (Buss, 1999; Cosmides & Tooby, 2013; Pinker, 1997; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990).
Part 2 emphasizes a longstanding conversation within this evolutionary anthropology. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin argued that, in species that reproduce sexually, many morphological and behavioral characteristics evolve by sexual selection. I explain the importance of this concept to politics, along with related issues foregrounded by Dawkins’ (1976, 1982) claim that evolution pursues the ‘interests’ of genes rather than those of organisms, groups or species. This leads to the distinction of absolute from positional goods, and an explanation of the logic behind moderating socially centrifugal arms races. Part 3 applies the theory, providing a Darwinian framework for institutionalizing a more egalitarian society – the biosocial contract. I expose the flaws, from an evolutionary perspective, in naturalistic objections to egalitarianism (3.1–3.2). I then call attention to findings of contemporary studies of happiness and social epidemiology that track the evolutionary picture, and offer policy areas where outcomes might be improved (3.3).
1. Bringing the state of nature back in
Since the epochal recasting of social contract theory by Rawls, contractarian liberalism has typically followed a thought-experiment or deontological model. Branches diverge in terms of emphasis, but the roots converge in anti-naturalistic premises derived from Kant. The equivalent for the ‘state of nature’ tends to be an imaginary situation featuring denatured or depersonalized individuals, with normative conclusions about the just and well-ordered society grounded in rational self-interest. It might be objected that Rawls does not fully follow Kantian denaturalization insofar as his original position screens out individual identity but retains ‘general facts of human moral psychology’ (Rawls, 1971: 145; and see 1963). Perhaps Rawlsian liberalism is ‘between two Enlightenments’ (Frazer, 2007), Humean/Smithian naturalism and Kantian deontology. 2 Truly, the ‘justificatory force of social contract views’ must depend on ‘the conception of the person’ and not just the ‘idea of agreement’ (Freeman, 1990: 122–123).
I would go further. A Darwinian perspective considers something like the difference principle to be justifiable only if it connects to our evolutionary history at a deep level, to ‘elementary facts about persons and their place in nature’ (Rawls, 1971: 257). Maximin’s thin anthropology of risk aversion and intuitive or formal reciprocity is insufficient. The ‘assumption … that a rational individual [in the original position] does not suffer from envy’ because ‘envy tends to make everyone worse off’, for example, is arbitrary, and begs the question as to the possible rationality of ‘feelings such as shame and humiliation’. One establishes participants ‘capable of a sense of justice’ yet ‘not moved by affection or rancor’ and uninterested in ‘gain relative to each other’ only by artificially divorcing the sense of justice from other human senses (Rawls, 1971: 143–144). 3 Ultimatum games, for instance, reveal instincts toward both egalitarian distribution and collectively costly punishment norms (Bowles & Gintis, 2011: 19–24; Frank, 1988: 170ff). The character of positional goods asks questions about distributive justice that the difference principle may be unable to coherently address (Brighouse & Swift, 2006), particularly if the issue is examined in terms of evolutionary biology. I return to this problem in the final section.
The state of nature/social contract idea should aim at an anthropologically defensible account of the conflicts political cooperation is designed to solve, the feasible solution options and their likely consequences. 4 Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume and Rousseau built their theories on taxonomy of the emotions: their triggers, their expressions and their relationship to self-interest. But the Kantian imperative to minimize all ‘merely anthropological’ considerations (e.g. Kant, 1991: 64–72) now runs deep: even major liberal revisions of Rawls’ excesses on this score tend to replicate them. 5
Kant’s ‘free, noumenal self … disembodied, dehistoricized, asocial, stripped of all its ends and objects, shorn of desires’ (Elshtain, 1992: 25) has frequently been attacked by communitarians on the right or by Nietzscheans and Foucauldians on the left. But in recent years political theorists working within the liberal tradition have explored a different sort of neo-naturalism. They critique deontological justice or an ideal speech situation by affirming the centrality of emotions to our conception and achievement of the public good (Frazer, 2010; Krause, 2008). But this does not require the subordination of core liberal democratic purposes to Aristotelian collectivism, Thomistic natural law or the radical indeterminacy praised by postmodernists. 6 Liberal neo-naturalism embraces neuroscience’s and behavioral economics’ emphasis on the interdependence of reason and emotion (Damasio, 1994; Frank, 1988). The Enlightenment idea to rationalize the passions by investigating their function(s) finds a fruitful methodology in evolutionary psychology, which gives study of the passions a novel rationality. It explains why departures from rational utility-maximization are non-random, and potentially advantageous if properly harnessed (Frank, 2004: 3–4, 13, 114–124; Somit & Peterson, 1999). 7
Contractarianism’s denatured choice situations are utopian; Rousseau’s state of nature, by contrast, is tragically normative. Parties to the Rawlsian social contract, disembodied and denuded of particularistic emotion, can understand their decisions as optimally rational both individually and collectively. Rousseau’s Second Discourse, by contrast, imagines an actual, historical state of nature, and figures departure from it as a loss only partially remunerable by political action. ‘No literal re-creation of the state of nature is possible’, Cullen (1993: 7) explains, but ‘its structure is replicable on a new plane’. The biosocial contract agrees with Rousseau insofar as it grants the EEA ambivalent normativity. Return is impossible and undesirable, but politics can and should increase human flourishing by approximating aspects of collective life that then occurred spontaneously and were group-adaptive. The cognitive and behavioral profile of Homo sapiens evolved because it was more adaptive than its competitors in the conditions in which such evolution took place. There is no clear path from it to goals now pursued in vastly different circumstances; neither, however, is it separable from those goals.
1.1 Rousseau’s evolutionary moral naturalism: A map of the problem
Aspects of the Discourses mark Rousseau’s political break with the philosophe circle from which his fame emerged; nevertheless, the Second Discourse is imbued with the radical materialism of the French Enlightenment. Rousseau extends Condillac’s and Diderot’s anti-theistic attacks on Cartesian epistemology to anthropology. Natural, other-directed passions prompt snowballing social development, leading to dilemmas only a new combination of reason with those passions can ameliorate. The Social Contract is then a mechanism for resolving the evolutionary crisis described in Discourse on Inequality, with a new sovereignty of law replacing the lost sovereignty of nature (Melzer, 1983).
Rousseau does not categorically detach human freedom from physical nature like Kant, citing Rousseau’s influence, would. 8 What Rousseau calls the ‘faculty of perfecting oneself’, whereby humans leave the eternal recurrence of animal instinct (‘whereas an animal is at the end of several months what it will be for the rest of its life’ [141]), distances humans from the rest of sentient life, but requires no Cartesian separation between human and animal (Duncan, 2009; Reisert, 2003). The debate ‘about whether animals participate in the natural Law’ is senseless since animals ‘partake in our nature through the sentience with which they are endowed’ (124–127). Darwin (1871, I: 36) agrees: ‘As man possesses the same senses with the lower animals, his fundamental intuitions must be the same’; such ‘instincts in common’ include ‘self-preservation, sexual love, the love of the mother for her new-born offspring … and so forth’.
In Rousseau’s state of nature humans ‘had neither vices nor virtues, unless these words are taken in a physical sense and the qualities that can harm an individual’s self-preservation are called vices, and those that can contribute to it, virtues’ (150). Rousseau blends Hobbesian unification of morality and self-interest intertwined with Humean unification of reason and passion. The ‘two principles prior to reason’ that are the ‘first and simplest operations of the human Soul’, shared with other animals, are amour de soi and pitié: ‘one interests us intensely in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer’ (127).
What triggers perfectibility? Microcosm of Rousseau’s text or macrocosm of evolutionary anthropology, the interpretive problem is similar. Each candidate suggested as Rousseau’s ‘fatal accident’ (167) transforming human nature can be re-explained as the effect of a previous cause. Thus the most plausible reconstruction of Rousseau’s story is multicausal, with positive feedback loops arising out of various interacting phenomena. Such factors closely track those that evolutionary theorists still try to sort out. For Rousseau, the crucial elements are language, reproductive relations and extended time-cognition. Shifts in these phenomena create the evolutionary imperative to collectively ameliorate destructive arms races. Below I explore how the evolutionary data supports many of Rousseau’s claims, at least in revised form.
Perfectibility, ‘social virtues and … other faculties which natural man had received in potentiality’ did not ‘develop by themselves’; they ‘needed the fortuitous concatenation of several foreign causes which might never have arisen’. These ‘various contingencies … could have occurred in several ways’, and Rousseau ‘can choose between them only on the basis of conjectures’. He mentions ‘the astonishing power of very slight causes when they act without cease’, a tantalizing adumbration of Darwinism. The faculty of pitié makes Rousseau’s humans intrinsically proto-social. From ‘this single attribute flow all the social virtues … Generosity, Clemency, Humanity [are] Pity allied to the weak, the guilty, or the species in general’. Pity ‘soften[s] the ferociousness of … the desire for self-preservation … temper[ing man’s] ardor for well-being with an innate repugnance to see his kind suffer’. One example is the ‘tenderness Mothers feel for their young and … the dangers that they brave in order to protect them’ (152–153, 159). So the natural state of humans (like many other species) contains at least one instance where pity conflicts with self-love –- mothers risk themselves for their children. Pity’s original function was the reproductive life of a species, not self-discipline or benevolence toward strangers.
Competition for food and competition for sex are, to Rousseau, fundamentally different. The former has obvious survival utility; the latter may threaten survival. The ‘terrible passion’ Rousseau cites when describing animal sexual competition introduces a non-altruistic passion that disobeys self-interest. Conflicts over nutrition in the state of nature ‘would seldom have led to bloodshed’; the more serious source of friction was that ‘ardent, impetuous’ force that ‘makes one sex necessary to the other … that braves all dangers, overcomes all obstacles, and in its frenzy seems liable to destroy mankind which it is destined to preserve’. It cannot be wholly factitious, for it has animal equivalents built into the structure of the natural world, like ‘the fights between the Males … as they feud over a female’. Such phenomena can be explained via the ‘scarcity of females in relation to the number of Males, or by the periods of exclusion during which the female consistently spurns the male’s advances’. Here Rousseau juxtaposes the human species, whose ‘females have never been known to have periods of heat and of rejection’. But ‘where the entire species ruts at the same time, there comes one terrible moment of common ardor, tumult, disorder, and fighting; a moment which does not occur in the human species, where love is never cyclical’ (154–156).
Rousseau suggests that language may be one of pitié’s accidental byproducts. His ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’ argues that human language arose to serve a social function. Other animals like ‘Beavers, ants, bees, have some natural language for communicating with one another’, and if humans ‘had never had any but physical needs, we might very well never have spoken and [yet] have understood one another perfectly’. He speculates that language’s origin lies in ‘the moral needs, the passions … love, hatred, pity, anger wrung their first voices from them’ (252–253). Many evolutionary theorists now draw the causal arrow from increasing social complexity to language development and brain hypertrophy (e.g. Dunbar, 1996). Whatever language’s origin(s), a feedback loop set in, ‘an ongoing selective pressure that favors large brains, ever better adapted to use language’ (Russell, 1993: 169). Rousseau proposes a similar ratchet effect: as ‘ideas began to expand and to multiply, and closer communication was established’, humans ‘sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language’ (146).
Human brains are around four times as large as predicted for a mammal of our size. Neocortical size in particular has increased much faster than body size since the divergence from chimpanzees. ‘Area 10’ of the lateral prefrontal cortex, crucial for abstract thinking, rule-learning, memory and planning, is twice as large in humans as in other apes, with greater connectivity (Gazzaniga, 2008: 12–30). Planning: extended time-consciousness plays a central role for Rousseau. His proto-humans have ‘no idea of the future’ and ‘no foresight or curiosity’; their ‘projects … hardly extend to the close of the day’. But discovery of the future leads to ‘reasoning about a state different from [our] own’ (143, 150). This brings new ideas of permanence to match new ideas of change. Cognizance of past and future is the prerogative of an individual with potentially permanent ties to other individuals.
In human children, mirror-recognition develops in tandem with care about others’ feelings: ‘advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation’ (de Waal, 1996: 67–70; 2009: 122–123). The few mammals that exhibit mirror-recognition all possess a rare type of brain cell, and damage to this neural capacity perverts empathy and future-orientation. The primates that evince mirror-recognition are the same ones that seem to approach or possess ‘theory of mind’ – though, in line with Rousseau’s limiting of perfectibility to humans, they do not use mirrors to spontaneously improve their appearance (Gazzaniga, 2008: 49–52; Tattersall, 1998: 46–48).
Chimps have been dubbed a ‘conservative’ species (Boehm, 1999: 150; Tanner, 1981: 61; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996: 46) because they stayed in the rainforest while our ancestors entered open woodland and savannah. The ‘shift to a savanna ecology’ in particular meant that ‘early hominids, who had evolved in a forest ecology’ of ‘stable resources and little predation’, now ‘confront[ed] an open-country habitat with uneven resources and an abundance of large carnivores’ (Turner & Maryanski, 2008: 3). 9 Rousseau identifies ‘contingencies’, like environmental change coupled with shifting migration patterns, that prompt experimentation with cooperative hunting, foraging and food preparation (161–162). In The Social Contract (I.6) he describes ‘men having reached the point where the obstacles that interfere with their preservation in the state of nature prevail … and humankind would perish if it did not change its way of being’ (Rousseau, 1997b: 49).
Like chimps, humans seek high-quality food that is difficult to find. But chimps are constrained to spend almost half of their waking hours either chewing or resting for digestion, denying them time for extended hunts. The human digestive tract is 60 percent shorter than predicted for an ape of our size. Seeking to explain human dominance over the biosphere, Darwin (1871, I: 136–137) called ‘fire, by which hard and stringy roots can be rendered digestible … probably the greatest [advance] excepting language, ever made’. The invention of cooking drove brain expansion and sociality by increasing available calories while decreasing the time required to acquire them; human brains consume 22 percent of basal metabolic energy, nearly three times the chimpanzee rate (Gazzaniga, 2008: 71, 89–90; Jolly, 1999: 367; Ofek, 2001: 66f; Ruse, 1998: 118–122).
Rousseau’s judgment that the first person who ‘enclosed a piece of ground’ and said ‘this is mine’ was the ‘true founder of civil society’ is famous. But Rousseau was really interested in this imaginary person’s ancestry: ‘this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only arise successively, did not take shape all at once in man’s mind.’ Property is an effect and not the cause of that ‘first look at himself [that] aroused the first movement of pride’, which produced the desire ‘to claim first rank as an individual’. The idea of possession first applied not to land but to people. The ‘establishment and … differentiation of families … brought Husbands and Wives, Fathers and Children together in a common dwelling’, prompting ‘conjugal love, and Paternal love … introduc[ing] a sort of property’ into human affairs. We began valuing reputation and eminence above survival: ‘Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself’, triggering novel emotions like ‘vanity and contempt … shame and envy’, and opportunities for strategic deception: ‘To be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake’ (161–170).
Rousseau anticipated evolutionary psychology in fascinating ways, but he made two crucially incorrect assumptions about sex in the state of nature. Rousseau infers the absence of long-term pair bonding in his proto-humans from its seeming absence in other mammals. He simultaneously denies that those proto-humans would have experienced conflict over sexual access. But he infers this from a human trait extremely rare among sexually reproducing species: the absence of advertised estrus in human females, and the resulting absence of seasonal mating. Evolutionary theorists now see the latter fact in a far different light.
2. The sexual origins of politics
Here I must step back to examine the pivotal role that reproductive structures play in evolutionary theory. A parsimonious way to summarize Darwinism is: all life evolves through variation, heritability and selection. Organisms’ morphological and behavioral characteristics vary; such characteristics are transmitted between parents and offspring; characteristics positively correlated with survival and reproduction under competitive conditions (‘fitness’) are selected for. 10 But for decades after Darwin, evolutionary theory was plagued by ignorance about the biology of variation and heritability. ‘We do not know what produces the numberless slight differences between the individuals of each species’, Darwin confessed (1871, I: 153), ‘but each peculiarity must have had its own efficient cause’.
This changed when the ‘evolutionary synthesis’ of the 20th century combined Darwin and Mendel: biological evolution was increasingly explored at the gene level rather than the organism or species level (Dawkins, 1976, 1982; Dobzhansky, 1941; Fisher, 1930; Haldane, 1932; Hamilton, 1996; J. Huxley, 1942; Lewontin, 1974; Trivers, 2002; Williams, 1966; Wright, 1968–1978). Genetic mutation and recombination alter phenotypical interaction with natural and social environments, constituting the variation selected for or against. Novel genetic strategies for longevity arose over evolutionary time, like cooperation with other genes to build vehicles (organisms), and recombination with other gene clusters (sexual reproduction). ‘Sociobiology’ remains controversial, but has proven effective at solving longstanding puzzles about animal behavior, like the existence of large sterile castes among the social insects and much else (Alcock, 2001; Badcock, 1991; Cronin, 1991).
The evolutionary synthesis validates both the optimistic Aristotelian claim that our built-in purpose is collectively to seek happiness and Rousseau’s more pessimistic account of humanity divided against itself. Genetic imperatives do and do not work in the interests of the organism as a whole. Evolution has made many things that are good for the organism – like, in the human case, trusting and caring relationships – also productive of its happiness. 11 But genes also carry the competitive imperative to maximize copying. The organisms they build are hostage to this demand, which creates patterns of thought and behavior justifiably deemed irrational and destructive from individual-, group- or species-level perspectives. Herbert Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ was always a poor slogan for Darwinism: evolution rewards successful reproduction more than survival. If natural selection ‘maximizes the transmission of genes’, survival is ‘just one strategy that provides repeated opportunities to transmit genes’ (Diamond, 1997: 11). Across the animal kingdom breeding generally preempts survival: most organisms do not live longer than one year (Alexander, 1987: 38–39; Ridley, 1993: 19, 168).
Darwin began to make sense of this by proposing that there are two selection processes. ‘Sexual selection’ anchors in his second major work, The Descent of Man (1871, esp. chs VIII, XIX–XX), refining Origin of Species’ conceptualizations of natural selection and adaptation. It selects for characteristics based on reproductive utility, and takes two related forms. Members of the same sex compete to monopolize access to the other sex; members of both sexes choose mating partners based on favored qualities. (The two forms are related where intra-sex competition is a method for disclosing such qualities.) Darwinism predicts divergent strategies, preferences and imperatives based on the structure of the reproductive life-cycle and a basic biological cost-asymmetry: the cheapness of sperm relative to ova and of insemination relative to gestation and lactation. Sexual selection theory lay dormant for almost a century after Darwin (Cronin, 1991); only the emergence of research programs like evolutionary psychology and sociobiology brought it back. Its importance to evolutionary theory is persuasively mapped out by Miller (2000). The basic point is the difference between an absolute and a positional good.
While natural selection tends to drive ‘convergent evolution’, or the development of the same adaptation (like eyes, claws, etc.) across many lineages, sexual selection is an ‘unpredictable, diversifying process’. Natural selection ‘takes place as a result of challenges set by an animal’s physical habitat and biological niche’. Sexual selection is ‘social selection’, fueled solely by an animal’s relationship to conspecifics. Sexual selection explains behaviors and ornamentation that are adaptively anti-parsimonious, ‘too excessive and expensive to have evolved for survival’ (Miller, 2000: 9–13, 19–20, 64). Male peacocks’ tails and male stags’ horns evolved despite their potentially deleterious relationship with survival. The growth of expensive and risky ornamentation signals reproductive fitness: the healthier an organism, the more waste it can afford. Therefore the adaptive effects of natural selection and sexual selection can be unrelated or even opposed. Among some extant polygamous gatherer-hunters, upwards of 30 percent of men die violently (the same rate observed in chimpanzees), but the most violent raiders have over twice as many wives and children as average, and the differential in male reproductive success is ten times the female (de Waal, 1996: 137; Gazzaniga, 2008: 70; Ridley, 1993: 196–197; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996: 68). The positionality of the reproductive ‘grade’ is what drives its arms-race logic. 12
Positional selection can be ameliorated by settlement at an equilibrium more stable than runaway competition. Consider Hobbes’ (1996 [1651]: 119) ‘Bees, and Ants’ who ‘live sociably one with another’ because ‘amongst these creatures, the Common good differeth not from the Private’. By contrast, ‘men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity’ and so experience ‘Envy and Hatred’. Man’s ‘Joy consisteth in comparing himselfe with other men’, and he ‘can relish nothing but what is eminent’. Hobbes’ human nature is Rousseau’s lamentable byproduct of evolution, but they agree on the problem. Hobbes was right to assume that rank and status are utilities in a sexually reproducing species; Rousseau was right that human preferences vis-à-vis competition and cooperation are highly context-dependent. It is unlikely that they are infinitely malleable, but social animals have evolved a wide variety of stabilizing arrangements. Locating humans within the primate lineage illustrates our potentials and perils in this regard.
In most monkey species it is females who ‘comprise the stable core of social organization’, and ‘society is given its shape by the relationships between overlapping generations of related females … females are permanent residents in social groups, males mere transients’ (Hrdy, 1981: 17). For thirty million years, ‘females dominated primate societies’, but a fateful rupture accompanies the ascent of apes (Russell, 1993: 144–150). Prosimians and monkeys tend to live in gynocentric clusters that male children leave at maturity, transferring to the periphery, returning periodically for reproduction. It is rare among mammals for females to be the sex transferred between groups at maturity, but gorillas, chimpanzees and humans reverse the typical pattern (Goldsmith, 1991: 58; Hrdy, 1981: 186; Tattersall, 1998: 40; Turner & Maryanski, 2005, ch. 4). Such exogamy prevents ape females from forming coalitions of female kin, the modal buttress of prosimian and monkey societies (Ridley, 1993: 114, 182).
Compression of the female ape’s reproductive cycle into monthly estrus marked a major sociobiological shift. Males were selected for continuous production of sperm and flooded with year-round testosterone. This turbo-charged intraspecific primate aggression, prompted stabilizing solutions: orangutans’ solitude, gorillas’ harem-archipelago and chimpanzees’ and humans’ male coalitions. The last lineage combined in-group hierarchy with the solidarity produced by channeling aggression outward through hunting and warfare (Boehm, 1999; de Waal, 1996: 30, 103, 123–132; Freedman, 1979: 45) – the distant origin of what humans came to call politics. Humans employ a combination of primate sexual strategies that adds up to something distinct. Orangutans combine only to mate, and mothers stay with offspring only as long as survival requires. Gorillas reproduce in small harems mostly independent of one another. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, are perpetually social but hyper-promiscuous by human standards, with minimal father–child bonding or pair bonding outside estrus.
This is not to suggest that gynocentric monkey societies exhibit no equivalents for politics; only that hominid political evolution was irrevocably tied to the trajectory of primate males. Pateman (1988: 2) argues that early modern social contract theory was also a ‘sexual contract’: ‘Men’s domination over women, and the right of men to enjoy equal sexual access to women, is at issue in the making of the original pact.’ This may have been ratified by early modern philosophers, but its origins go back much further and can be reinterpreted by Darwinism. Pateman’s sexual contract reads like a codification of the evolutionary process by which androcentric apes descended from gynocentric monkeys (Hrdy, 1981; Russell, 1993; Smuts, 1995).
It is interesting to note that infanticide, typically looked upon with horror in human communities (except perhaps in circumstances of dire necessity), is a common strategy for reproductive success across the animal kingdom. The average female gorilla loses at least one of her offspring to infanticide; it accounts for one-third of infant gorilla deaths (Diamond, 1997: 74). But the organized killing of conspecific adults, a ‘startling exception to the normal rules for animals’ (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996: 63) observed only in humans, chimpanzees and a few other species, is accepted and valorized. Rape is infrequent among mammals; its mammalian incidence is heavily concentrated in apes. In orangutans one-third to one-half of all copulations are rapes, typically assaults by ‘small man’ males whose atrophied stature and peripheral status otherwise predicts being selected out (Jolly, 1999: 80–81; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996: 132ff). Gatherer-hunters war chiefly for vendetta or the capture of enemy women. Human polities impose proscriptions on rape, but many patriarchal, misogynist cultures more or less countenance it as a mating strategy, as when women are compelled to marry their violators because they have been ruined for all others. This perverse tradeoff – muted adult–infant violence, magnified adult–adult violence – calls attention to the dramatic shift in sexual politics that constituted human evolution.
Human sexuality is ‘abnormal by the standards of the world’s thirty million other animal species’, among whom pair bonding and recognition of children are rare, and sex occurs in public, ‘emphatically not just for fun and … rarely divorced from its function of fertilization’ (Diamond, 1997: 2–3, 8–9, 82). Humans evince permanent sexuality based on concealed estrus, which vastly extends the time-horizon of the interest the sexes can take in each other (Ridley, 1993: 222). The part of the primate brain central to sexual desire is larger in humans than in other apes, controlling for size (Turner & Maryanski, 2005: 157, 166–167). Private mating has no primate parallel. It probably accompanied ‘the evolution of publicly recognized mating partners … strengthen[ing] paternal certainty and support while allowing participation in a larger, more integrated social group’ (Jolly, 1999: 186–187). Privatized sex, as Rousseau guessed, brought a new type of collective bond into the primate world, triggering human political patterns. Two plausibly suggested EEA tendencies are reproductive opportunity leveling and reverse dominance hierarchy.
Boehm (1993, 1999) uses the latter term to describe informal mechanisms by which gatherer-hunter societies ‘regularly create and maintain egalitarian blueprints for social behavior’, checking ‘upstarts who threaten the autonomy of other group members’ (1999: 43, 60; see also Pandit & van Schaik, 2003) – thus avoiding, prior to agriculture, the despotism-tending social structures of other primates. Political equality among men, in a species needing non-kinship-based cooperation to survive and provision children (Bowles & Gintis, 2011; Hrdy, 2009), necessitated the maximally feasible suppression of harem monopoly and promiscuous fragmentation. The mammalian average is for 21 percent of men, but only 4 percent of women, to leave no offspring (Freedman, 1979: 13); human societies almost never reproductively condemn such a large proportion of males.
Unlike gorillas or orangutans, chimpanzee males ‘aggregate rather than disperse in the face of sexual rivalry’, and there are ‘indications that a sort of trade is going on. After a long grooming session among the males, a subordinate male may invite the female … without interference by the others’ (de Waal, 1989: 82). Sex also ameliorates social tension, separate from its procreative function, among bonobos, who diverged from chimpanzees around two million years ago (de Waal, 1989, ch. 5). Eros’ empire spread even further beyond insemination in humans as long-term parental investment evolved. Barkow (1989: 180–185) speculates that human dominance hierarchies became more symbolic and prestige based, and less overtly agonistic, because of the evolution of long-term male investment in children. Fitness signals beyond physical prowess, like intelligence, empathy, humor and so on, would have been selected for.
Human sexual selection did not produce runaway morphological fitness displays like stags’ horns and peacocks’ tails, or the stark sexual dimorphism of elephant seals. 13 If Barkow is right that the payoff was increasingly to symbolic fitness above or in addition to physiological fitness (for both sexes), then selection might have approached an EEA ceiling. Brains could only become so large and calorie-consuming before they threatened the rest of the organism (and the female birth canal); small mobile groups benefited from egalitarian norms; with no economic surplus to be monopolized, the reproductive payoff to symbolic dominance by high-status members was relatively minor. Transition to large-scale settled agriculture does not change condition one, but it changes conditions two and three. Civilization creates a surplus that can be diverted to provision specialized military, priestly and bureaucratic castes; only then do we find runaway human equivalents (800-woman harems and the like) for other mammals’ high convertibility of power into reproductive success, emblems of the general degradation of EEA egalitarianism after the Neolithic transition.
‘Iron and wheat … civilized men, and ruined Mankind’ (Rousseau, 1997a: 168) strikes a characteristically hyperbolic note. Yet Rousseau was correct to suppose that gatherer-hunters suppress the anti-egalitarian trajectory of evolutionary arms races. Perhaps democratic republics could do something similar. For several decades theorists of republicanism have excavated a neo-Roman heritage of early modern political thought that, they claim, explodes the distinction between negative liberty as individual non-interference and positive liberty as collective self-legislation. Instead they focus on non-domination, calling into question assumptions about the liberty-maximizing abilities of free-market capitalism (e.g. Pettit, 2006). Seen in evolutionary terms (e.g. Maryanski & Turner, 1992), the project of recovering elements of pre-agricultural egalitarianism via the modern republic takes on a new appearance. 14
Walzer (1983: 82–83) describes the social contract as ‘an agreement to redistribute the resources of the members in accordance with some shared understanding of their needs’; this is not just a pragmatic treaty but ‘a moral bond [that] connects the strong and the weak, the lucky and the unlucky, the rich and the poor’. Walzer’s moral bond ‘draw[s] its strength from history, culture, religion, language, and so on’. Why shackle a defense of egalitarianism to such contingencies? It can and should be naturalized (e.g. Corning, 2011; Skyrms, 1996, 2004). Republicanism refracted through Darwinism telescopes freedom as non-domination back to the biological origins of human politics.
3. Evolutionary arms races and the biosocial contract
I now examine two objections to the redistributive republic that themselves deploy the state of nature and Darwinism. The first is deontologically premised on self-ownership and Kant’s injunction against treating individuals as means to collective ends. The second is consequentialist: uncoordinated market interaction mimics evolutionary adaptation, producing outcomes superior to rational coordination. These are the arguments of the two most influential libertarian political philosophers of the 20th century, Robert Nozick (3.1) and Friedrich Hayek (3.2). 15 I explain an alternative Darwinian justification for economic intervention and redistribution, fitting recent findings from the fields of hedonics and social epidemiology into my evolutionary framework, and suggesting potential avenues of public policy (3.3).
3.1 Self-ownership
In Hobbes’ state of nature, fundamental right tracks fundamental interest: defense against violence and enslavement. This by itself says nothing about procedural justice, because we could exercise such rights as universally (though probably not as effectively) in anarchy as in stable constitutional democracy. Yet Nozick (1974) and other libertarians analogize public appropriation and redistribution of individual resources to slavery.
The Hobbesian reply: slavery compared with what? Only substantive conceptions of human flourishing justify those procedure decisions (whether night watchman non-interference, or the difference principle, or whatever) claiming to generate anarchy-superior equilibria. Nozick associates himself with Locke, but Lockean self-ownership relies on a theism Nozick barely discusses. He brings up the place of God in Locke’s explanation for why parents do not own children despite producing them (Nozick, 1974: 287ff), but abandons this exegesis suddenly. However, as a feminist critic points out, there must be some additional principle ‘explain[ing] how and why it is that persons come to own themselves, rather than being owned, as other things are, by whoever made them’. Locke’s theism might fail to convince those outside Protestantism, or outside Locke’s version thereof. But the void where it was strongly implies ‘rejecting the general principle that persons are entitled to whatever they produce, regardless of the needs of anybody else’ (Okin, 1989: 79, 86; see also Arneson, 1991; Holmes, 1996: 255).
Nozick calls rights ‘moral side constraints’, and naturalizes them by saying they ‘reflect the fact of our separate existences’, evoking the Kantian persons-as-ends/persons-as-means dichotomy. Citizens might choose to sacrifice themselves to higher or future goods, but their state may not, for ‘there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good’ (Nozick, 1974: 30–33). 16 Must coercion aiming for a common good, but in doing so traducing the professed autonomy of some, appeal to a quasi-mystical notion of the state as purposive organism? 17 That brand of accusation can be leveled at libertarianism. A strong teleology (like theism) may ground absolute natural rights; Darwinism cannot. The EEA built a brain capable of ideas like private property and autonomy, but in circumstances where Lockean husbandry was unknown, and stringent (if informal) group control over resources was the norm. This does not automatically indict private appropriation, but it cautions against ranking self-ownership above other natural human concerns.
Philosophers often model the self-ownership debate as a Robinson Crusoe state of nature, where the only relevant costs of appropriation by one are the foregone gains of the others. So it must be stressed that in actual politics every important right is simultaneously a fiduciary social obligation (Holmes & Sunstein, 1999). 18 A philosophy whose ideal-type is the clearing and planting of ‘wild’ land by stateless settlers and pioneers is unsuited to complex, post-industrial societies, and misrepresents the state of nature (understood as EEA). It is illegitimate to infer that since only human beings feel or claim autonomy then autonomy is the core of human existence. Darwinism asks, instead, what functional demands of human politics grafted the potential for such a notion onto existing primate biology. Rights, then, are social utilities that exist to the extent that we are willing to pay their cost toward greater adaptive benefit.
3.2 Catallaxy
Hayek (1960, 1973–1979, 1988) takes the benefits flowing from free economic and cognitive exchange as human culture’s approximation of Darwinism: over evolutionary time the market/biosphere achieves adaptive design without a designer, and without participants uniting on purposes or ends. Indeed, he claims the true discoverers of this process were Enlightenment philosophers like Adam Smith, from whom Darwin got the idea for natural selection (Hayek, 1960: 59; 1988: 24–25). The ‘experimentation of many generations’ contains by definition ‘more experience than any one man possesses’. Hence Hayek’s Burkean presumption against attempting to consciously guide the process: rationality itself (like bodily homeostasis) is the jury-rigged product of trial-and-error evolution, nested in tradition and habit (1960: 27, 62). With possibilities for genetically engineering on the horizon, it is salutary to be reminded how precarious (given pleiotropy, multicausality, feedback loops between genome and environment, and so forth) prediction in such matters is and always will be.
The problem is that Hayek is of two minds about the depth of the analogy. He is skeptical and even derogatory toward suggestions that the human mind transcends evolution, either by finally understanding it, or by having crossed a post-evolutionary threshold of freedom from biology. Yet Hayek also argues that cultural evolution simulates Lamarckian rather than Darwinian evolution (1988: 25). The Lamarckian organism strives after goals and passes down the fruits of success – so why dissociate planning and civilization? Perhaps Hayek’s aim is not to discredit rational direction fully, but only to proscribe its monopolization by a central authority (1960: 37, 111). But his degree of diffidence here is unwarranted, as can be shown by pursuing the biology–polity analogy. Human immunodefense is the cumulative product of parasite/host arms races stretching back thousands of generations. There is a bottom-up, evolutionary wisdom built into the system it would be foolish to trust any single mind or team of minds to redesign from scratch. Still, only an ‘administrative nihilism’, as Huxley (1872: 64ff) dubbed Spencer’s laissez-faire, accuses vaccine inventors of engaging in dangerous hubris because nature’s million-year designs trump NIH 5-year plans.
Vaccination may seem too easy an example of freedom not constrained but expanded by government mandates. Insights from evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics, however, prevent our drawing a sharp line between medical and market actions. Admitting that on his definition ‘to be free may mean freedom to starve, to make costly mistakes, or to run mortal risks’, Hayek announces, ‘the penniless vagabond who lives precariously by constant improvisation’ is ‘freer than the conscripted soldier with all his security and relative comfort’ (1960: 18). But in the vast excluded middle one might be ‘forced to be free’ from pernicious aspects of economic competition along the lines of mandates against the risk of carrying or contracting infectious diseases. Much like the ‘externalities’ of industrial pollution, positional competition imposes unpriced social costs that must enter the ledger alongside its benefits (Frank, 1999: 272–273). The peacocks rigged by sexual selection to house energy-wasting displays have no choice in the matter; humans who understand evolutionary mechanisms do.
Hayekian liberalism ignores the cross-purposes of natural and sexual selection, a ‘systemic flaw in the dynamics of competition’ resulting ‘from the very logic of the process itself’ (Frank, 2011: 19–22). When not tethered to public constraints, markets do not maximize efficiency but lead to ‘wasteful distortion toward spending on positional goods’ (70) that do not improve general welfare. 19 Hayek charges Fabian socialism with hubris, but his level of confidence in evolution’s rationality is that hubris inverted. It is a throwback to the pre-Darwinian synthesis assumption that evolution works for species as wholes. An up-to-date biosocial contract will undermine the analogy between the free market and fitness optimization: the fact that a competitive trajectory was naturally imposed on humans does not mean that passively allowing that trajectory to unfold is the optimal solution. Moreover, political intervention is not going against nature; it is ‘fighting nature with nature’ (de Waal, 1996: 3), ‘using one set of predispositions to overrule others – just as our evolved desire to preserve our looks can override our evolved taste for fat and sugar’ (Miller, 2000: 136).
3.3 The political hedonics of status, consumption and employment
Wealth and happiness are linked as persons exit serious poverty, but there is little correlation beyond that. Aspirations tend to increase in tandem with income growth over the life-cycle, perennially undermining modal expectations for increased future happiness. While the top of a national income distribution is happier than the bottom at any given time, longitudinal increases in GDP or personal income do not permanently increase individual or national happiness; nor do per-capita GDP comparisons between countries match happiness comparisons. 20
Darwinism and sexual selection explain that the dichotomous jump from penury to comfort is like survival, to be valued absolutely, while competition past that is positional – a ‘hedonic treadmill’. That need not imply wholesale decoupling of wealth and happiness. There is a strong case for rising living standards when they are reasonably shared, especially since shared growth delivers moral dividends (Friedman, 2005). States must ‘treat the dollars of rich and poor as having different values’ not as undifferentiated input/output data tabulating economic growth. The key is to fight hedonically self-defeating tendencies for wealth increase to be monopolized by positional consumption: ‘limit[ing] the self-defeating struggle for higher relative income on the model of nations agreeing to end arms races’ (Layard, 2005: 136, 151). Excessive positional spending subtracts investment from infrastructural and educational public goods. But incentivizing ‘inconspicuous consumption’ in areas where our ‘capacity to adapt is more limited’ such that ‘additional spending … create[s] significant and lasting improvements in well-being’ – like leisure time, or accepting smaller houses in return for shorter commutes and other environmental gains – could reunite GDP growth and happiness (Frank, 1999: 75, 90–91, 100). Frank (1999: 211ff – following Seidman, 1997) suggests a progressive consumption tax as one relevant policy response.
The problems with using GDP as a proxy for national economic health are well established: it discounts elements of well-being that are not or cannot be monetized, and its correlation with other important socioeconomic indicators is murky (Sunstein, 1994). Stiglitz et al. (2010) recommend governments shift statistical focus from aggregate production to household well-being, paying particular attention to distribution and employment stability. Humans are adapted to value social relations more (and understand them better) than anonymous market relations. Thus it is unsurprising that the major socioeconomic correlates of happiness lie elsewhere. As predictors of stable hedonic utility, health and familial relationships significantly outstrip wealth (Easterlin, 2004). Within the market, employment status – not just being employed, but doing work perceived as complex and meaningful absent authoritarian supervision (Lane, 2000: 162–169) – is much more closely tied to happiness than income.
Easterlin (2013) takes an important lesson of hedonics for public policy to be that full employment and comprehensive social insurance are the best ways to increase happiness. Prolonged unemployment is one of the only negative life events to which people do not adapt: the unemployed would have to be paid $400,000 a year to make up for lost happiness strictly in income terms (Graham, 2009: 18; Halpern, 2010: 24–25; Layard, 2005: 67). Unemployment and job insecurity produce disutilities beyond the workers in question, exposing their children to the risk of long-term harms beyond the lost income (Lane, 2000: 52, 172, 329). Radcliff’s (2001: 939; see also Alvarez-Diaz et al., 2010) data links happiness with politics ‘that insulate citizens against the worst forms of market dependence’. Hacker (2006) suggests the cruelest recent trend in American political economy is the spike in instability, not in inequality per se. Hedonically, the loss this entails probably dwarfs whatever utilities of efficiency or growth occurred because of it (Hacker, 2006: 25–26; Layard, 2005: 171).
The issue can be anchored at a deeper level, for ‘[i]t is not too clear’, as Simone de Beauvoir (1989 [1949]: xxxiv) puts it, ‘just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask’. 21 But a growing body of literature suggests significant correlation between inequality and illness. Egalitarians, reasonably enough, criticize unequal access to health care as an injustice (e.g. Dworkin, 2000, ch. 8). But we need not let the procedural cart lead the substantive horse. The basic problem is that stratification produces unequal health, not that it enables inegalitarian healthcare arrangements. As Wilkinson (2000) 22 demonstrates, people of high social status everywhere live healthier and longer lives than those lower down. Additionally, egalitarian societies produce better general health and longevity outcomes than highly stratified societies. These results stand even after controlling for healthcare expenditure and personal responsibility factors like diet, exercise, smoking and so forth.
The key variable seems to be ‘the extent to which relationships … are structured by low-stress affiliative strategies which foster social solidarity’ versus ‘more stressful strategies of dominance, conflict and submission’. As with happiness, unemployment affects health negatively, while control over work affects it positively. Also parallel to the happiness data: comparing between developed countries rather than within any one shows life expectancy and per capita income to be unrelated. ‘Among the developed countries it is the most egalitarian that have the highest life expectancy, not the richest.’ The correlation between stratification and bodily vulnerability extends to violence. The American homicide rate varies sharply from state to state, with inequality within a state the strongest single predictor (Wilkinson, 2000: 4, 11, 15).
Primate parallels suggest the potential for evolutionary explanation. Low status among primates correlates not only with increased vulnerability to predation (because of territorial peripheralization) but also with comparatively high parasite loads (Tattersall, 1998: 44). Experiments that artificially manipulate dominance hierarchies in primate groups, by creating new collectives entirely out of dominants so some must lose status, replicate findings across human societies (Wilkinson, 2000: 35). Low-status experience weakens the cardiovascular system, produces high levels of stress hormone and triggers depression. Instinctual, stress-activated ‘fight/flight’ responses are adaptive in many natural contexts. In species that both cooperate and compete things are more intricate, but it is plausible that the option to ‘compensate’ for low status by naturalizing an anxious, resentful or self-abasing relationship to the world was selected for. But ‘a survival strategy as a response to an acute threat may have biological costs as a response to a chronic threat’ (Marmot, 2004: 141). Human depression and anxiety might seem to be cognitive/emotional experiences irreducible to physical pathology, but prolonged or frequently repeated experience with them demonstrably degrades physical health.
Whatever the worth of happiness, can one defend the position that health be thus sacrificed to abstract conceptions of economic efficiency or natural rights? This shift in focus grounds the egalitarianism of the biosocial contract at a deeper level than revealed preference, without recourse to communitarian jeremiad about the corrosive effects of markets on moral character or civic virtue. A philosopher who posits ‘no such common measure of all interests and purposes as happiness or utility’ suggests that there might yet be ‘much more genuine agreement about certain specifiable evils’ (Mackie, 1977: 139). Hobbes’ Leviathan and Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality can each be read as arguing that health broadly construed – the absence of violence and fear of violence (Hobbes); the minimization of suicide and premature decrepitude (Rousseau) – is a good baseline criterion for judging a political order. Political theory does not end there, obviously, but it seems a fine place to start, or start again. Humankind is born in sexual selection’s chains; everywhere evolution’s republic reigns, we can be forced to be free.
Footnotes
Funding
This paper was written with the help of a 2011–2013 New Faculty Fellowship provided by the American Council of Learned Societies.