Political biology

It is a great privilege to be the author of a book that receives a symposium in History of the Human Sciences. My feelings are of deepest gratitude to Steve Fuller and the five contributors for their interest and engagement with Political Biology. Before discussing their arguments in detail, I’d like to offer two general considerations. I have appreciated these reviews and others that have appeared over the last year, including critiques or (in my view) misreadings or misunderstandings (see for instance, Deichmann, 2017; Macleod, 2016). As the Italian philosopher of language Umberto Eco famously remarked, each text (or work of creativity in general) is an opera aperta, an unfinished work that once released in the public dimension no longer belongs only to its author (1989) and is enriched through continued interpretation. Accordingly, I do not approach this response as an exercise in defending boundaries, but take pleasure in the conversations and arguments that these commentaries have launched.

A second general consideration regards the progression of academic knowledge and the place of books and book symposia within this. One of Political Biology’s arguments, as Snait Gissis (2017) has insightfully noticed, is that the temporality of knowledge in theories of heredity is not best represented by unilinear progress or incessant innovation, but instead implies cyclical return and assemblages of multiple temporalities. This may seem quite a reactionary attitude, and perhaps it is. This distrust of the rhetoric of progress and innovation is for me even stronger when it comes to contemporary academic knowledge. For example, while a culture of academic disputations flourished in ancient times and the Middle Ages (see for instance Novikoff, 2013), who nowadays has sufficient time and energy to waste on the organization of book symposia, not to mention reading and commenting extensively on someone else’s argument? ¹ And why do this in the highly competitive and individualistic ethos of 21st century global universities? In an age of cheap self-promotion in which a nasty or celebratory comment on Twitter becomes for many of us the ultimate tribunal of reason, I feel that it should be the task of critical social scientists to organize alternative spaces in which slowness, collective discussion, and disengagement from the imperative of immediate productiveness should be the winning criteria. With this somewhat polemical premise, I come to discussing the six (including Fuller’s introduction) pieces that analyse Political Biology. Given their different background and approaches, I will follow the interventions’ order rather than gathering these comments under common areas or tropes, although a few overlapping aspects will emerge.

In ‘The Hour of Political Biology’, Fuller introduces what he calls the ‘Meloni Thesis’, i.e. that ‘the discreteness of the biological and social sciences as bodies of knowledge depends on a hard nature/nurture distinction’. I think that in the spirit of a genuinely political-epistemology, this is actually only one side of my thesis. The other, necessarily correlated, is that the making of hard heredity on which genetics capitalized, was also the condition for an alignment of evolutionary theory with liberal-democracy, and its basic tenet of autonomous individualism (see Meloni, 2017). The key figure here is August Weismann, the great modernizer and purifier of biological heredity. Weismann’s notion of the sequestration of the germplasm made both sides of my thesis possible: on one side, Weismannism favoured what Fuller calls ‘disciplinary boundary construction and maintenance’ between the social and the biological disciplines (see Durkheim’s usage of Weismann in Meloni, 2016a); on the other it perfectly justified the liberal-humanist ontology of Homo duplex: a dual entity split between a biological nature, fixed and unique, albeit universal, and a constructed cultural dimension that may be changed without touching the biological substratum (see for example Weismann’s view on the evolution of music in Meloni, 2017). These two sides were constitutive of what one may call a liberal and anti-eugenic consensus that fully flourished after the Second World War: a clear demarcation between disciplines, and the possibility of changing human beings without touching their biological substratum. Moreover, Weismann complemented the ethos of liberalism by arguing, as Renwick notices in his piece, ‘that each generation started from scratch in biological terms’: in effect, his famous denial of the inheritance of acquired characters emancipated each generation from the burden of previous ones.

I doubt that under a radical view of epigenetics (see Jablonka, 2016), this set of dichotomous arrangements and clear-cut boundaries can still hold. If in a radical view of epigenetics cultural heritage (alimentary regimes, behavioural styles) and financial inheritance (socio-economic status) tend to some extent to intersect with the area of biological heredity (at least for gene expression), the consequences for the liberal consensus are devastating. This applies both to forms of knowledge production, i.e. the emergence of biosocial knowledge (such that now it is arguably difficult to study the social without addressing some aspect of the biological), and for the ontology of the human (which now appears as an irreducibly biosocial or biocultural creature). This is why I think Fuller is correct in understanding Lamarckism as a theory that always transgresses neat boundaries between learning and instinct, culture and heredity, and therefore poses a potential challenge to the post-eugenic liberal consensus that dominated evolutionary thought after the Second World War. It is only because we tend to associate eugenic thought with a certain hard hereditarian and rightist wing of the movement that we easily neglect what is otherwise rather evident: that if biology is deeply plastic and environmentally dependent, there is much wider scope for intervention, either in terms of a constant incitation to reverse negative environmentally acquired effects, or as a continuous form of surveillance to avoid damaging an always malleable and sensitive body, brain, or genome.

A number of observations advanced by Renwick in his ‘The Task of Sisyphus’ are very timely and insightful and, at least for me, quite concordant with the above description. Resonating with the idea of an erosion of the 20th century separation of the biological and the social, Renwick notes that epigenetics may create a new ground where ‘social scientists will no longer be able to reason without biology, as they were able to throughout most of the 20th century’. At the same time, it is exactly because of the irrevocable entanglement of social and biological processes that we may find ourselves in a position where ‘a renewed expectation’ takes place ‘that humans might be able to reshape biology within a politically convenient timeframe’. For me, the present importance of epigenetics lies precisely in this aspect highlighted by Renwick. The discovery of biological pathways through which social and biological time can be aligned in an unprecedented way at the molecular level overcomes one of the key sociological objections against the conflation of social and biological temporalities (Newton, 2007). Renwick suggests further important points that may challenge the wide chronology I advanced in Political Biology. I found particularly significant his comment that the post-1945 British welfare state was far from being inimical to biosocial ideas. I defer to his extensive knowledge of British social policy. My understanding for continental Europe is quite different. I suspect that in France, Italy and Germany the post-Second World War growth of the welfare state abandoned many (perhaps all?) biosocial arguments. However, it is for historians to consider the nature and extent of any shift in biosocial arguments in different national contexts. Finally, I found enlightening Renwick’s mention of Pinker’s The Blank Slate, a book that in its frustrating theoretical poverty was most certainly in the back of my mind while writing Political Biology. Perhaps Political Biology can be seen as an anti-Blank Slate: not because it argues defensively (as many have done in social science quarters) that in fact social scientists always held to a substantial, i.e. not blank, view of human nature. Rather, the argument of my book, pace Pinker, is that it was precisely the model of fixed and innate biology privileged by Pinker that enabled the social science consensus he despises so much.

Melinda Bonnie Fagan has written a beautiful and somewhat polemical critique of my reading of epigenetics. She is not the only one (see Deichmann, 2017; MacLeod, 2016). What epigenetics really is, and what it may mean for evolution, is becoming a tormented issue. I’d like just to clarify that it is not my goal to adjudicate which views of epigenetics and epigenetic inheritance (transgenerational, only intra-cellular, etc.) are closer to the truth. I am neither qualified nor interested in clarifying things in such a clear-cut way, and further, I am sceptical of any such attempt. It is often the imprecise nature of scientific concepts that make them so productive (Rheinberger, 2003; see Meloni and Testa, 2014). My point in Political Biology was to argue that, regardless of the final veracity of these claims, in the surprisingly brief period since 2000 we have witnessed an impressive rehabilitation of ideas that only three decades ago we would find bizarre or unacceptable: basically, that there might be more than DNA transmission in biological heredity. These postgenomic views are already shaping anthropological or economic reflections on race and human capital often mediated by research programmes like the Developmental Origin of Health and Disease, DOHaD (Almond and Currie, 2011; Kuzawa and Sweet, 2009; Wells, 2010). Whatever our opinion on the science, we need to pay attention to these new claims and assess their potential biopolitical and ethical dimensions. Just to strengthen my point: after 1907 several sterilization laws were passed in the US and internationally by governments that had rejected them just one decade before. These were based on a view of genetics no closer to the truth, no more validated and no less uncertain than any epigenetic claims nowadays, transgenerational or not. Nonetheless, under mutated political and scientific conditions, uncertain knowledge became certain political and legal obligation. In this hiatus between scientific and socio-political temporalities, social scientists need to sharpen their critical lens. A different important point raised by Fagan is that it would be possible to offer an alternative genealogy of epigenetics, much more in continuity with 20th century molecular science or, as Landecker (2016) has noticed elsewhere, cybernetic knowledge. I do not disagree at all. I certainly used a bit of rhetoric to offer a more discontinuist story. My goal was to counter a superficial treatment of postgenomics as just a chronological term (the period after the deciphering of the Human Genome Project) rather than the emergence of a different thought-style. My answer to Fagan would be that even if epigenetic and postgenomic language have their roots in 20th century work (and they certainly do), their difference today is in terms of scale and integration. For the first time, we now have a series of research programmes (from epigenetics to microbiomics), increasingly integrated among themselves and embedded in wider evolutionary reflections (the extended synthesis), that find an interested audience among social scientists who can freely engage with postgenomics without major ideological obstacles (such as the Cold War opposition of hard and soft heredity). In my view, this is no small thing. I also definitely believe that postgenomics is a phase in evolutionary thought and not just a set of techniques with little or no conceptual relevance. Jablonka and Lamb (2014) still offer the best argument in favour of this thesis.

I found Sarah Chan’s piece ‘In search of a post-genomic bioethics’ inspiring and helpful. I would be very satisfied if my work can contribute to making bioethicists more aware of the political and historical context of their terminological repertoire, as Chan claims. Chan in particular shows brilliantly that the purist view of genetic essentialism as the sacred deposit of human identity is seriously undermined by the genealogical reconstruction of how a fixed view of heredity came to predominate. If our genome is not closed and is contaminated (at least in terms of functioning) by the effects of mundane experience, what happens to bioethical reflection? Perhaps some relaxation of its mystical value or alleged exceptionalism? These are definitely very good questions that Chan raises in her attempt to go beyond ‘palaeo-bioethics’. My suggestion here would be to support spaces of institutional dialogue where bioethicists could engage with historians and theorists working on biopolitics in a work of reciprocal contamination. Nathan Emmerich’s ‘Bioethics, Public Intellectuals and Political Biology Today’ also raises very important issues that were among the originary concerns of Political Biology: a rediscovery of the ways in which scientists may usefully be involved in political speculation well beyond the minor role they have assumed as domesticated experts in the post-WWII liberal consensus. My book tells the story of a period when H. J. Muller, future Nobel Prize winner, wrote seductive appeals to Stalin to persuade him to embrace a vast programme of sperm banks in the Soviet Union (Stalin was not pleased and Muller had to leave the country); a time when Julian Huxley published a book entitled If I Were a Dictator (it was 1934, not a bad year to foresee such a role although, to be fair, it was not just his book but a whole series that bore that title). We have marginalized, if not forgotten, these memories of authoritative scientists in our micro-managerial (and very Eurocentric) view of the contemporary politics of science (especially embodied in some Euro-American STS studies). However, I don’t see why this should remain the natural state of the politics of science. Citing Rosanvallon, Emmerich writes of the ‘increasing drive toward the democratization of the public square’ and how democracy and its institutions ‘have also been subject to processes of democratization’. Authoritative scientists and intellectuals have been urbanized and transformed into dialogical or embedded experts. But, again, there is no unilinear and cumulative progress here. The history of politics is full of major regressions and setbacks, if we want to speak a linear language. Since Political Biology was published we have seen two major traumas in the West: Brexit and Trump. Europe is in its worst political state since the 1930s, on the brink of a permanent state of emergency (Dalhuisen, 2017). My point here is that we should not be too enchanted by teleological narratives about the persistence and ineluctability of liberal-democratic institutions. My point in Political Biology was exactly that the liberal consensus in evolutionary biology may be more fragile and precarious than we thought. If this changes, and the wider political system changes as well, the dialogical role of scientists may also be open to changes in ways that we don’t expect. The recent controversy about Adam Perkins’ The Welfare Trait (2016), as Emmerich notices, is by itself quite significant. Interestingly, Perkins’ argument about the role of the dysfunctional welfare state in the reproduction of the ‘employment-resistant personality trait’ merges authoritarian views of scientific expertise with quite sophisticated developmentalist (i.e. non-genetic) language (Meloni, 2016b). Significant for the discussion here is Perkins’ belief that he is safe from repeating the past mistakes of authoritarian biology because he has (partly) abandoned the language of genes and embraced environmental effects.

Finally, Stephen Casper’s ‘Reductionism in Epigenetics’ makes an important point about the lack of non-deterministic or non-biologistic counterpoints to the many debates I highlighted in my book. While I am not a fan of critiques focusing mainly on terms such as determinism or reductionism (especially when used in the singular without specification or declination), Casper is right to evoke the paucity of external positions to eugenics especially in the interwar period. One could count dissenters on the fingers of one hand, and some of the anti-eugenicists of the time would not be attractive intellectual forebears for many contemporary scholars (pope Pius XI with his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii or Trofim Lysenko, for instance). Casper notices correctly that it is the simplification of scientific findings, and sometimes even their caricature, that become ‘the lesson and by extension the political’. As he writes, ‘naïve reductionism mediates slippages in translations from biological framing devices into political framing devices’. I am not sure this is something we can effectively counter. Politics functions through simplistic and dichotomous oppositions, friend–enemy being the most fundamental (Schmitt, 1996[1932]). How to inject complexity in such a framework is something quite difficult to imagine.

To conclude, Fuller speaks of a meso-level in which the analysis of Political Biology is situated. I am quite happy with this definition, although I probably interpret it differently from Fuller. With Political Biology I wanted to demarcate a space of investigation in between the fetishism of the micro in many STS studies, and the macro simplifications of biopolitical theorists who lack engagement with the history of science. The latter group are guilty of having made the label biopolitics quite irrelevant to histories of eugenics, biomedicine and environmental sciences (this is why I use the term political biology rather than biopolitics). I am not sure I entirely succeeded in my goal, as many of the critiques here point out. I remain convinced nonetheless that it is this meso-level that needs to be occupied to make our disciplines (STS, social studies of science, social theory, sociology of knowledge) relevant once again in a world that changes rapidly and increasingly seldom for the better. ²