Nature, Nurture and Liberal Values _ Prospect Magazine

8/3/2019 Nature, Nurture and Liberal Values _ Prospect Magazine

1/14

31-01-12 Nature, nurture and liberal values | Prospect Magazine

1/14prospectmagazine.co.uk//nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagl

91

Aanraden

127

Features

Nature, nurture and liberalvalues

ROGER SCRUTON 25TH JANUARY 2012 ISSUE 191

Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to

acknowledge. But peopleand politics and moralitycannot be

described just by neural impulses

The window to the soul or just acollection of cells? Transition 5

(detail) by Susan Aldworth

Beyond Human Nature by Jesse Prinz (Allen Lane,

22)

Incognito by David Eagleman (Canongate, 20)

You and Me: the Neuroscience of Identity by SusanGreenfield (Notting Hill Editions, 10)


2/14



Human beings are diverse and live in diverse ways.Should we accept that we are diverse by nature, having

followed separate evolutionary paths? Or should we

suppose that we share our biological inheritance, but

develop differently according to environment and

culture? Over recent years scientific research hasreshaped this familiar nature-nurture debate, which

remains central to our understanding of human nature

and morality.

For much of the 20th century social scientists held that

human life is a single biological phenomenon, which

flows through the channels made by culture, so as to

acquire separate and often mutually inaccessible forms.Each society passes on the culture that defines it, much

as it passes on its language. And the most important

aspects of culturereligion, rites of passage and lawboth unify the people who adhere to them and divide

those people from everyone else. Such was implied by

what John Tooby and Leda Cosmides called the

standard social science model, made fundamental to

anthropology by Franz Boas and to sociology by mileDurkheim.

More recently evolutionary psychologists have begun to

question that approach. Although you can explain the

culture of a tribe as an inherited possession, they

suggested, this does not explain how culture came to be

in the first place. What is it that endows culture with its

stability and function? In response to that question theopinion began to grow that culture does not provide the

ultimate explanation of any significant human trait, not

even the trait of cultural diversity. It is not simply that

there are extraordinary constants among cultures:gender roles, incest taboos, festivals, warfare, religious

beliefs, moral scruples, aesthetic interests. Culture is

also a part of human nature: it is our way of being. Wedo not live in herds or packs; our hierarchies are not


3/14



based merely on strength or sexual dominance. We

relate to one another through language, morality and

law; we sing, dance and worship together, and spend as

much time in festivals and storytelling as in seeking our

food. Our hierarchies involve offices, responsibilities,

gift-giving and ceremonial recognition. Our meals areshared, and food for us is not merely nourishment but an

occasion for hospitality, affection and dressing up. All

these things are comprehended in the idea of culture

and culture, so understood, is observed in all and only

human communities. Why is this?

The answer given by evolutionary psychologists is that

culture is an adaptation, which exists because itconferred a reproductive advantage on our hunter-

gatherer ancestors. According to this view many of the

diverse customs that the standard social science model

attributes to nurture are local variations of attributes

acquired 70 or more millennia ago, during the

Pleistocene age, and now (like other evolutionary

adaptations) hard-wired in the brain. But if this is so,

cultural characteristics may not be as plastic as the

social scientists suggest. There are features of the

human condition, such as gender roles, that people

have believed to be cultural and therefore changeable.

But if culture is an aspect of nature, cultural does not

mean changeable. Maybe these controversial features

of human culture are part of the genetic endowment of

human kind.

This new way of thinking gained support from the

evolutionary theory of morality. Defenders of nurture

suppose morality to be an acquired characteristic,

passed on by customs, laws and punishments in which

a society asserts its rights over its members. However,

with the development of genetics, a new perspective

opens. Altruism begins to look like a genetic strategy,which confers a reproductive advantage on the genes


4/14



that produce it. In the competition for scarce resources,

the genetically altruistic are able to call others to their

aid, through networks of co-operation that are withheld

from the genetically selfish, who are thereby eliminated

from the game.

If this is so, it is argued, then morality is not an acquired

but an inherited characteristic. Any competitor species

that failed to develop innate moral feelings would by now

have died out. And what is true of morality might be true

of many other human characteristics that have

previously been attributed to nurture: language, art,

music, religion, warfare, the local variants of which are

far less significant than their common structure.

I dont say that view of morality is right, though it has

been defended by a wide variety of thinkers, from the

biologist John Maynard Smith (its original proponent) via

the political scientist Robert Axelrod to such

popularisers as Matt Ridley and Richard Dawkins. But

even if morality is a partly acquired characteristic that

varies from place to place and time to time, it might stillrest on innate foundations, which govern its principal

contours.

Noam Chomskys speculative linguistics has proved

enormously important in this debate, since language is

at the root of culture in all its manifestations: it is a

paradigm case of a social activity that entirely changes

the relationships, capacities, knowledge and the world ofthose who engage in it. Yet there could be no

explanation of language that regarded it merely as a

socially transmitted trait, with no deeper roots in biology.

The rapid acquisition of language by children, at the

same rate in every part of the globe, and on the same

paucity of information from the surroundings, suggests

that there is an innate universal grammar, to which each

child attaches the fragmentary words and phrases that

strike his ear, to generate new and intelligible utterances


5/14



of his own. What Steven Pinker has called the language

instinct is implanted by evolution, which endows each

child with mental competences that are common to our

species.

If we follow the evolutionary biologists, therefore, we

may find ourselves pushed towards accepting that traits

often attributed to culture may be part of our genetic

inheritance, and therefore not as changeable as many

might have hoped: gender differences, intelligence,

belligerence, and so on through all the characteristics

that people have wished, for whatever reason, to rescue

from destiny and refashion as choice. But to speculate

freely about such matters is dangerous. The oncerespectable subject of eugenics was so discredited by

Nazism that dont enter is now written across its door.

The distinguished biologist James Watson, co-

discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, was run

out of the academy in 2007 for having publicly

suggested (admittedly in less than scientific language)

that sub-Saharan Africans are genetically disposed to

have lower IQs than westerners, while the economist

Larry Summers suffered a similar fate for claiming that

the brains of women at the top end are less suited than

those of men to the study of the hard sciences. In

America it is widely assumed that socially significant

differences between ethnic groups and sexes are the

result of social factors, and in particular of

discrimination directed against the groups that seem todo less well. This assumption is not the conclusion of a

reasoned social science but the foundation of an

optimistic worldview, to disturb which is to threaten the

whole community that has been built on it. On the other

hand, as Galileo in comparable circumstances didnt

quite say, it aint necessarily so.

***

We find ourselves, therefore, in the middle of another


6/14



tense debate, in which it is not religion, but liberal

values, which seem to be challenged by the theory of

evolution. It is against this background that the

philosopher Jesse Prinz has entered the fray, with a big

book arguing that there is little reason to think that

biology has a major impact in accounting for humandifferences. He patiently examines the arguments given

for attributing this or that trait to genetic inheritance, and

tries to show either that the research is methodologically

flawed, or that the conclusion is not supported by it. I say

patiently, though

I should also add that, when it comes to discussing IQ

and

sexual differentiation, Prinz intemperately dismisses

those like Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein and Larry

Summers who have not been persuaded by the liberal

consensus.

Prinz believes that our cognitive powers are awakened

only when they have experience on which to get to

work. Infants learn to divide the world into kinds by

extrapolating from what they feel, hear and see. There

are no innate classifications, and no roles or

relationships that are not in some sense and to some

measure socially constructed. Prinz attacks Chomskys

claim that there is a universal grammar and dismisses

the theory held by Jerry Fodor and others that our

mental processes are conducted in a shared language

of thought. Silent thinking, for Prinz, involves the use ofimages, which have their source in individual

experience, while language is picked up by a

spontaneous statistical analysis from which a child

derives the rules of grammar. Prinz even goes a little

way towards resuscitating the notorious Sapir-Whorf

hypothesis, according to which the structure of a

persons language determines the contours of his world.

Language, he writes, is an invention, not an instinct

If language teaches us about who we are, the lesson is


7/14



that we are fundamentally flexible. Prinz goes on to

argue that gender difference is to a great extent

acquired, that the distinction between individualists and

collectivists is cultural rather than biological, and that

emotions are socially constructed from raw material that

is innate only because it belongs to basic bodilyprocesses and gut reactions.

All that is argued boldly and with much support from the

literature of experimental psychology. But I could not

help feeling that it falls short of its target. In The Blank

Slate (2002) Steven Pinker assembled the evidence for

the conclusion that our fundamental capacities are

implanted by evolution and malleable only in thosematters in which malleability would confer a reproductive

advantage. His argument was meticulous and serious,

and the weight of scientific evidence impossible to deny.

In this or that particular the science might be faulted or

revised, but the broad case is surely compelling.

Consider, for example, the division of roles everywhere

to be observed between men and women. There is a

powerful reason to think that this is rooted in a deeper

division of biological labour, selected in the harsh

conditions that threatened our ancestors with extinction.

For human beings manifest neoteny, the trait of giving

birth to helpless large-brained offspring, who can look

after themselves only after ten years of nurture and

nowadays not even then. Neoteny is a huge

evolutionary advantage; but it is purchased at an equallyhuge biological cost. A species whose young are as

vulnerable as human children needs both organised

defence and serious home building if it is to reproduce

itself. And on those granite foundations has been built

the romantic castle of sexual difference.

But there is another reason for being dissatisfied with

Prinzs approach. When the idea of cultural diversity firsttook root in the German Enlightenment it was associated


8/14



with the study of the myths, customs and artworks of

antiquity, with the exploration of the religions of the east

and with visits to the tribal cultures of Africa and

America. A kind of imperial reverence for those things

animated the minds of those who studied them, and it

was with a hint of regret that the early anthropologistsrecorded the rapid collapse of local cultures under the

withering eye of their researches. Prinz belongs to

another mindsetone that can be observed in some of

the disciples of Boas. He does not have much sympathy

for any culture other than the one in which he is

immersedthe liberal egalitarian culture of the

American academy, which holds that sexual roles are

socially constructed, that sexual morality is exhausted

by the requirement of consent, and that all

disadvantage is down to environmental factors which

we can collaborate to overcome. He would perhaps

deny that this is a culture, rather than a set of rationally

held beliefs. But the whole tendency of his argument is

to suggest that we can and should live in the way that he

lives, not endowing our differences with the status ofnatural barriers or God-given paths, but opening

ourselves to a kind of soft diversity, in which human

possibilities flourish in a condition of mutual acceptance.

It may be that this is the direction in which we are

moving. But for all he says to the contrary it could be that

there are obstacles to progress that are fixed in our

nature and not to be changed by social adjustment. Weare familiar with the feminist charge that women come

out worse in maths tests because of unconscious

discrimination, stereotyping and other factors that

allegedly sap their confidencean argument that, in the

eyes of its proponents, was further proved by Larry

Summerss foolhardy attempt to question it. But does

anyone believe that men are ten times as likely to end

up in prison as women because of unconscious

discrimination or stereotyping? Of course not. We


9/14



recognise that men are by nature more aggressive and

more inclined to settle disputes by violence. And no

educated person is likely to dispute the fact that this

difference between men and women is genetic. The real

question is how far does this kind of genetic influence

extend? Susan Greenfield refers to recent brain-imagingresearch by Ryota Kanai and others at UCL which

purportedly suggests that students with conservative

political attitudes tend to have larger than normal

amygdalae, while among those of liberal persuasion it is

the anterior cingulate cortex that stands out. Could this

be the proof of WS Gilberts proposition, that Every child

who is born alive / Is either a little liberal / Or a little

conservative?

Those speculations bring us to another and far more

serious obstacle to the humane understanding of our

condition than the one that troubles Prinz. Advances in

neuroscience are beginning to suggest that, while the

brain is malleable and adaptable, it comes with its own

inherent restraints, and with connections that have been

wired without our knowledge and definitely without our

consent. Hence processes in the brain can affect our

decision-making without our being able to counter them.

When in 1966 Charles Whitman, a man of previously

good character, killed 13 people and wounded 32 more,

shooting from the top of the University Tower in Austin

Texas, he had already indicated that he felt something

was not quite right in his head. After he was shot by apolice marksman, an autopsy revealed a small tumour

pressing on the amygdala, which neuroscience regards

as the seat of the gut reactions through which we protect

our space. So was Whitman to blame for what he did?

And if not, does this provide me, after decades of

reproach for my conservative opinions, with the

amygdala excuse, just like Whitman?

Taking off from the Whitman case David Eagleman


10/14



argues that we should revise our sense of legal and

moral responsibility, so as to recognise that most of what

we do and feel arises from processes over which we

have no control. The brain moves incognito beneath our

conscious deliberations, like a great ocean liner on the

deck of which we walk up and down, imagining that wemove it with our feet. Offering his own version of the

Freudian story, in the luminous prose for which he is

rightly esteemed, Eagleman argues that most of what we

do is more influenced by unconscious than by

conscious processes, and that concepts like

responsibility and freedom cannot survive intact from the

advances of neuroscience. Whether it is nature or

nurture that wired up the brain, the wiring is for the most

part none of our doing, and nothing for which we can be

praised or blamed.

Eagleman is too subtle a thinker, and too responsible a

person, to draw quite that conclusion. He wants to revise

our concept of responsibility so that his kind of

responsibility is still contained in it. My brief response,

however, is to suggest that he has misdescribed the

problem. The picture that he gives, of the fragile I riding

the elephant of grey matter while pretending to be in

charge of it, misrepresents the nature of self-reference.

The word I does not refer to some conscious part of

the person, the rest of which is a passive and hidden it.

The I is one term of the I-You relation, which is a

relation of accountability in which the whole person isinvolved. To use the first-person pronoun is to present

myself for judgement. It is to take responsibility for a host

of changes in the world, and in particular for those for

which you can reasonably call me to account by asking

why? This question is the foundation of a co-operative

enterprise, in which we elicit from each other the

reasons, meanings and choices that make us intelligible.

Understanding the logic of the question why? is a task

that has been addressed by several recent philosophers


11/14



Elizabeth Anscombe, Stephen Darwall, Sebastian

Rdl and others. It is the question that underlies the

concept of responsibility in the common law. And

philosophers have done much to show that the dialogue

through which we establish and broker our

responsibilities is well founded and not necessarilyvulnerable to disruption by our newfound knowledge of

the brain.

This point suggests how Prinz might have put

philosophy to work on behalf of his conclusions. The

real question raised by evolutionary biology and

neuroscience is not whether those sciences can be

refuted, but whether we can acceptwhat they have tosay, while still holding on to the beliefs that morality

demands of us. From Kant and Hegel to Wittgenstein

and Husserl there have been attempts to give a

philosophyof the human condition that stands apart

from biological science without opposing it. But those

attempts are either not noticed or given short shrift in

Prinzs argument which, by attempting to fight the

biological sciences on their own ground, is condemned

to a losing wicket.

We are human beings, certainly. But we are also

persons. Human beings form a biological kind, and it is

for science to describe that kind. Probably it will do so in

the way that the evolutionary psychologists propose. But

persons do not form a biological kind, or any other sort

of natural kind. The concept of the person is shaped in

another way, not by our attempt to explain things but by

our attempt to understand, to interact, to hold to account,

to relate. The why? of personal understanding is not

the why? of scientific inference. And it is answered by

conceptualising the world under the aspect of freedom

and choice. People do what they do because of events

in their brains. But when the brain is normal they also actfor reasons, knowing what they are doing, and making


12/14



themselves answerable for it.

This does not mean that we should ignore what goes on

in the brain. In her lively monograph Susan Greenfield

emphasises that our brains are plastic and can be

influenced in ways that pose a risk to our moral

development. Prinzs defence of nurture against nature

may look like a defence of human freedom. But nurture

can as easily destroy freedom as enhance it. We can

bring up children on passive and addictive

entertainments that stultify their engagement with the

real world and rewire the neural networks on which their

moral development depends. The short-term pursuit of

gratification can drive out the long-term sense ofresponsible agency. Moreover, if children learn to store

their memory in computers and their social life in

portable gadgets, then gradually both memory and

friendship will wither, to linger on only as futile ghosts

haunting the digital archives.

I sympathise with those worries. But it does not change

the position that a philosopher should adopt.Greenfields argument suggests that there is a kind of

human development that prepares us, at the

neurological level, for the exercise of responsible

choice. If we bring up our children correctly, not spoiling

them or rewiring their brains through roomfuls of digital

gadgetry, the sense of responsibility will emerge. They

will enter fully into the world of I and You, become free

agents and moral beings, and learn to live as they

should, not as animals, but as persons.

Allow children to interact with real people, therefore, and

the grammar of first-person accountability will emerge of

its own accord. Undeniably, once it is there, the I-to-you

relation adds a reproductive advantage, just as do

mathematical competence, scientific knowledge and

(perhaps) musical talent. But the theory of adaptation

tells us as little about the meaning of I as it tells us


13/14



about the validity of mathematics, the nature of scientific

method or the value of music. To describe human traits

as adaptations is not to say how we understand them.

Even if we accept the claims of evolutionary psychology,

therefore, the mystery of the human condition remains.

This mystery is captured in a single question: how canone and the same thing be explainedas an animal, and

understoodas a person?

Follow Prospect on TwitterandFacebook

IF YOU LIKED THIS ARTICLE, WHY NOT TRY THE

FOLLOWING:

Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinkerSigmund

Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal

to flatter humankind, says John Gray

The great divide: Cinema, literature and other aspects

of western culture are increasingly open to Asian

influence. Not so western philosophy, which remains

almost entirely sealed off from eastern traditions. Why?

Richard Rorty He was arguably the most influential

philosopher of his time: an American who argued

against truth, reason and science. Yet his radicalism

turns out to be oddly disarming, writes Simon

Blackburn

Bookmark on Delicious

Digg this post

Recommend on Facebook

Share with Stumblers

Tweet about it

Subscribe to the comments on this post


14/14


Section: FEATURES

Subject:

Tags:AESTHETIC INTERESTS,ALDWORTH,ASPECTS OF

CULTURE, BIOLOGICAL PHENOMENON, CANONGATE,

CULTURAL DIVERSITY, CULTURE RELIGION, DAVID EAGLEMAN,

DURKHEIM, FRANZ BOAS, GENDER ROLES, HIERARCHIES,

HUMAN NATURE, HUMAN TRAIT, INCEST TABOOS, JESSE PRINZ,

JOHN TOOBY, LEDA COSMIDES, LIBERAL VALUES, MORALITY

AND LAW, NATURE NURTURE, NATURE NURTURE DEBATE,

RITES OF PASSAGE, SEXUAL DOMINANCE, SOCIAL SCIENTISTS,

SUSAN GREENFIELD, TRANSITION 5

Documents

Nature, Nurture and Liberal Values _ Prospect Magazine