On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  On

  Human

  Nature

  On

  Human

  Nature

  ROGER SCRUTON

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  PRINCETON AND OXFORD

  Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

  Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

  Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

  press.princeton.edu

  Jacket design by Michael Boland for thebolanddesignco.com

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Control Number 2016957094

  ISBN 978-0-691-16875-3

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  Preface vii

  Chapter 1. Human Kind 1

  Chapter 2. Human Relations 50

  Chapter 3. The Moral Life 79

  Chapter 4. Sacred Obligations 113

  Index of Names 145

  Index of Subjects 149

  PREFACE

  What follows is a revised version of the three Charles E. Test memorial lectures that I gave, under the auspices of the James Madison Program, at Princeton University in fall 2013. I am very grateful to the program and its director, Robert P. George, for the invitation and for the hospitality shown to me during my visit. And I am especially grateful to the lively audience that a visitor can always expect at Princeton and to the spirit of free inquiry that prevails there. In preparing these lectures for publication I am conscious that they are at best a summary of my views and do not in any way deal with all the difficulties that will occur to the attentive reader. Some of these difficulties I have addressed in The Soul of the World and in a fourth chapter here added to the lectures; others must await some later attempt to tackle them or else accompany me to the grave.

  Earlier drafts were read by Bob Grant, Alicja Gescinska, and two anonymous readers for Princeton University Press, and from the remarks of all four I have benefited enormously.

  Scrutopia, Easter 2016

  CHAPTER 1

  HUMAN KIND

  We human beings are animals, governed by the laws of biology. Our life and death are biological processes, of a kind that we witness in other animals too. We have biological needs and are influenced and constrained by genes with their own reproductive imperative. And this genetic imperative manifests itself in our emotional life, in ways that remind us of the body and its power over us.

  For centuries poets and philosophers have told stories about erotic love—Plato leading the way. These stories have endowed the object of love with a value, a mystery, and a metaphysical distinction that seem to place it outside the natural order. And in these stories biology seems hardly to figure, even though they are stories that would make little sense were it not for our condition as reproductive animals, who have established their niche by sexual selection.

  We are territorial creatures, just like chimpanzees, wolves, and tigers. We claim our territory and fight for it, and our genes, which require just such an exclusive claim over habitat if their replication is to be guaranteed, depend upon our success. Yet when we fight it is, as a rule, in the name of some high ideal: justice, liberation, national sovereignty, even God Himself. Once again, it seems that we are in the habit of telling ourselves stories that make no reference to the biological realities in which they are rooted.

  The most noble of human attributes also have their biological underpinning—or so it seems at least. The self-sacrifice that causes a woman to lay everything aside for her children, the courage that enables human beings to endure the greatest hardships and dangers for the sake of something that they value, even those virtues such as temperance and justice that seem to require us to vanquish our own desires—all these things have seemed to many people to have their counterparts among the lower animals and to demand a single explanation, generalizable across species. Personal affection has been brought within the fold of biology, first by Freud’s highly metaphorical and now largely discredited theory of the libido and more recently by the attachment theory of John Bowlby, for whom love, loss, and mourning are to be explained, at least in part, as phylogenetic products of our need for a “secure base.”1 Bowlby was a psychiatrist, acutely aware that human beings do not merely inherit their emotional capacities but also adapt and refine them. Nevertheless, he described love, grief, and mourning as biological processes and argued that “the child’s tie to his mother is the human version of behaviour seen commonly in many other species of animal.”2

  By putting that behavior in its ethological context Bowlby was able to give a far more plausible account of our primary attachments than those given by Freud and his immediate successors. Our personal affections, he argued, are to be explained in terms of the function that they perform in our “environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” and the explanation will not be couched in terms that make any radical ontological division between us and other mammals. The discovery of the hormone oxytocin, and its effect in predisposing animals of many different species toward affectionate relations with their own kind, has further encouraged the view that attachment can be understood and explained without reference to the stories with which we humans embellish it.

  When Darwin and Wallace first hit on the idea of natural selection, the question arose whether our many “higher” characteristics, such as morality, self-consciousness, symbolism, art, and the interpersonal emotions, create such a gap between us and the “lower” animals as to demand explanation of another kind. Wallace at first thought that they did not but later changed his mind, coming to the conclusion that there is a qualitative leap in the order of things, setting the higher faculties of human kind in a different category from those features that we share with our evolutionary neighbors. As he put it: “We are endowed with intellectual and moral powers superfluous to evolutionary requirements,”3 and the existence of these powers could therefore not be explained by natural selection for fitness.

  Darwin, however, remained attached to the view that natura non facit saltus and in writing The Descent of Man tried to show that the differences between humans and other animals, great though they are, can nevertheless be reconciled with the theory of stepwise development.4 For Darwin the moral sense is continuous with the social instincts of other species.5 Through the theory of sexual selection, he gave an enhanced account of the resources on which natural selection can draw and made the suggestion, taken up in our own time by Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Miller, that many of the “higher” faculties of man, such as art and music, which seem, on the face of it, to be devoid of any evolutionary function, should be seen as resulting from selection at the sexual level.6 Darwin went on to give an account of human emotions in which their expression in the face and gestures is compared with the expression of emotion in other animals: and his purpose in all this was to suggest that the perceived gap between us and our evolutionary cousins is no proof of a separate origin.7

  GENETICS AND GAMES

  This controversy has taken on an entirely different character since R. A. Fisher’s pioneering work in population genetics.8 Problems with which Darwin wrestled throughout his life—the sexual selection of dysfunctional features (the problem of the peacock’s tail), for example, or the “altruism” of insects (the problem of the anthill)—are radically transformed when the locus of evolution is seen as the self-replicating gene, rather than the sexually reproducing animal.9 And as Joh
n Maynard Smith and G. R. Price showed in an elegant essay,10 the new way of looking at natural selection, as governed by the replicating “strategies” of genes, permits the application of game theory to genetic competition, which in turn delivers a neat solution to another famous problem—that of aggression, noticed by Darwin and spelled out in detail by Lorenz.11 The rut among stags can be derived as an “evolutionally stable strategy”: one that enables the genes of rutting stags to reproduce themselves while providing the genes of hinds with the best return for their reproductive investment. This approach, generalized by R. Axelrod,12 has had profound consequences, for example, in showing that there might be an evolutionary advantage in reciprocally altruistic cooperation, even when not part of kin selection (as when female bats allegedly share their booty of blood with other unsuccessful females in a colony). It has also suggested a general theory of “altruism,” held by its supporters to explain not only the inflexible self-sacrifice of the soldier ant but also the fear-filled and heroic self-sacrifice of the human soldier.13 In short, we seem to have been brought a step nearer the proof of Darwin’s contention that the moral sense is continuous with the social instincts of other species.

  The genetic approach has not been without its critics. Advocates of “group selection” have argued that selection must occur at higher levels than that of the gene if we are to account for such socially complex behavior as the self-limitation of populations and the dispersal patterns of herds.14 Others have been skeptical of the assumption that there can be small-scale transitions that lead by a chain of changes from the social behavior of animals to the social behavior of people. In particular, Chomsky has argued that the acquisition of language is an all-or-nothing affair, which involves acquiring a rule-guided and creative capacity that cannot be built up from singular connections between words and things.15 A Chomskian would be dismissive of those attempts to inflict language on animals—on chimpanzees and dolphins, for example—that were once greeted with such enthusiasm, as the proof that they are like us or we are like them.16 Whatever the interest of the word-thing/word-experience connections that animals can make, these are connections of a radically different kind than those embedded in a transformational grammar. They are piecemeal associations that, detached from generative rules and semantic organization, remain no more vehicles of thought, dialogue, and interrogation than the warning cries of birds and bonobos or the wagging tails of dogs. Again, the objection is not widely regarded as conclusive, and geneticists have advanced theories of “protolanguage” that attempt to show both that there could be piecemeal advances toward linguistic competence and that these advances would be selected at the genetic level.17

  GENES AND MEMES

  We know that the human species has adapted to its environment; but we also know that it has adapted its environment to itself. It has passed adaptations to its offspring not only genetically but also culturally. It has shaped its world through information, language, and rational exchange. And while all those features can be acknowledged by biology and given a place in evolutionary theory,18 that theory will not, in the first instance, concern the replication of genes but, rather, the reproduction of societies. Moreover, human societies are not just groups of cooperating primates: they are communities of persons, who live in mutual judgment, organizing their world in terms of moral concepts that arguably have no place in the thoughts of chimpanzees. It is possible that cognitive science will one day incorporate these moral concepts into a theory of the brain and its functions and that theory will be a biological theory. But its truth will be tested against the distinctively human capacities that, according to Wallace, seem “superfluous to evolutionary requirements,” and not against the features of our biological makeup that we share with other animals.

  Now, philosophers who argue in that way find themselves confronting a powerful current of opinion that has flowed through all the channels of intellectual life since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. Natural selection can account for all the difficult facts presented by human culture, Dawkins suggests, once we see culture as developing according to the same principles as the individual organism. Just as the human organism is “a survival machine” developed by self-replicating genes, so is a culture a machine developed by self-replicating “memes”—mental entities that use the energies of human brains to multiply, in the way that viruses use the energies of cells. Like genes, memes need Lebensraum, and their success depends upon finding the ecological niche that enables them to generate more examples of their kind. That niche is the human brain.19

  A meme is a self-replicating cultural entity that, lodging in the brain of a human being, uses that brain to reproduce itself—in the way that a catchy tune reproduces itself in hums and whistles, so spreading like an epidemic through a human community, as did “La donna è mobile” the morning after the first performance of Rigoletto. Dawkins argues that ideas, beliefs, and attitudes are the conscious forms taken by self-replicating entities, which propagate themselves as diseases propagate themselves, by using the energies of their hosts: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”20 Dennett adds that this process is not necessarily harmful:21 there are, among parasitic organisms, both symbionts, which coexist harmlessly with their hosts, and mutualists, which positively amplify the host’s ability to survive and flourish in its environment.

  To make the theory remotely plausible we must distinguish memes that belong to science from memes that are merely “cultural.” Scientific memes are subject to effective policing by the brain that harbors them, which accepts ideas and theories only as part of its own truth-directed method. Merely cultural memes are outside the purview of scientific inference and can run riot, causing all kinds of cognitive and emotional disorders. They are subject to no external discipline, such as that contained in the concept of truth, but follow their own reproductive path, indifferent to the aims of the organism that they have invaded.

  That idea is appealing at the level of metaphor, but what does it amount to in fact? From the point of view of memetics, absurd ideas have the same start in life as true theories, and assent is a retrospective honor bestowed on reproductive success. The only significant distinction to be made when accounting for this success is between memes that enhance the life of their hosts and memes that either destroy that life or coexist symbiotically with it. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings, however, that they can distinguish an idea from the reality represented in it, can entertain propositions from which they withhold their assent, and can move judge-like in the realm of ideas, calling each before the bar of rational argument, accepting them and rejecting them regardless of the reproductive cost.

  It is not only in science that this attitude of critical reflection is maintained. Matthew Arnold famously described culture as “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”22 Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, “Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge. There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature, and music. And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion. Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world? Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?”

  That reaction has lost none of its appeal. And it points to a fundamental weakness in “memetics.” Even if there are units of memetic information, propagated from brain to brain by some replicating process, it
is not they that come before the mind in conscious thinking. Memes stand to ideas as genes stand to organisms: if they exist at all (and no evidence has been given by Dawkins or anyone else for thinking that they do), then their sempiternal and purposeless reproduction is no concern of ours. Ideas, by contrast, form part of the conscious network of critical thinking. We assess them for their truth, their validity, their moral propriety, their elegance, completeness, and charm. We take them up and discard them, sometimes in the course of our search for truth and explanation, sometimes in our search for meaning and value. And both activities are essential to us. Although culture isn’t science, it is nevertheless a conscious activity of the critical mind. Culture—both the high culture of art and music and the wider culture embodied in a moral and religious tradition—sorts ideas by their intrinsic qualities, helps us to feel at home in the world and to resonate to its personal significance. The theory of the meme neither denies that truth nor undermines the nineteenth-century view that culture, understood in that way, is as much an activity of the rational mind as science.

  SCIENCE AND SUBVERSION

  The concept of the meme belongs with other subversive concepts—Marx’s “ideology,” Freud’s unconscious, Foucault’s “discourse”—in being aimed at discrediting common prejudice. It seeks to expose illusions and to explain away our dreams. But it is itself a dream: a piece of ideology, accepted not for its truth but for the illusory power that it confers on the one who conjures with it. It has produced some striking arguments—not least those given by Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell. But it possesses the very fault for which it purports to be a remedy: it is a spell, with which the scientistic mind seeks to conjure away the things that pose a threat to it.