On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection

[The] history of human societies from hunting and gathering to early industrialism is, in many ways, a history of structural elaborations that imposed constraints on individuals and that legitimated these constraints with ideologies.

In Darwinian Politics, Paul H. Rubin made repeated references to a book by Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner called The Social Cage – Human Nature and the Evolution of Society published in 1992. The present book from 2008 is by the same two authors and (from what I understand) revisits some of the same themes. Compared to Rubin, Maryanski and Turner discuss some of the same topics and even reach somewhat similar conclusions. However, they do it from very different perspectives. Rubin is an economist, while Maryanski and Turner are sociologists. Though anchored in their own academic discipline, On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection is as much a book in biology as it is in sociology and contains some powerful internal critique of sociology and the social sciences in general. Maryanski and Turner reject the so-called Standard Social Science Model that has downplayed biological and evolutionary perspectives and led to a "social constructivist" outlook in sociology and elsewhere in the social sciences. On the other hand, Maryanski and Turner also distance themselves from what they take to be “the other extreme”, that culture and social structure is to be explained largely by biology – “a mistake that early sociobiologists once made”.

As its title indicates, the book traces the evolutionary origins and transformations of human societies. The discussion is incredibly detailed and goes back to the very beginnings more than 65 million years ago to find the common ancestor of monkeys and apes. The first human societies (hunter-gather societies) do not enter the scene until chapter six. Chapters seven, eight and nine discuss horticultural societies, agrarian societies, and industrial (and post-industrial) societies respectively. By far the most interesting chapter of the book is the tenth and final one, entitled "Strangers in a Strange Land: Evolved Apes Living in Sociocultural Cages". This concluding chapter can be read by itself, and for many readers this will be all they need.

Rather than starting out with ideological assumptions or utopian presuppositions about "the good society", Maryanski and Turner ask "What behavioral propensities did natural selection install in hominids over the long course of their biological evolution?", and by answering this question they can answer another: "What patterns of social organization are compatible or incompatible with these propensities?" The general conclusion they reach is that industrial (and post-industrial) societies are far more compatible with human nature than any other societal formations since hunting and gathering.

For many generations, social critics of many stripes have held a highly romanticized view of pre-industrial societies as pleasant places to live. Whatever the hypothesized pathology of industrial society - alienation, marginality, egoism, anomie - early sociologists never questioned the validity of their comparisons of individuals living in pre-industrial to those in industrial societies. In fact, they tended to have a collectivist view of human nature that fit monkeys more than apes.

... criticisms of modernity are based on a flawed view of human nature. Humans are not the descendants of monkey ancestors, as most sociological criticisms of modernity imply. A monkey might like the world that sociologists hypothesize existed before industrialism [...] In contrast, an ape would find pre-industrial societies after hunting and gathering highly constraining. And, if we look at the historical record, humans left pre-industrial formations of horticulture and agrarianism as quickly as they could, once another option presented itself.  

In contrast to the chronological disposition of the book, I will opt for a more thematic approach and comment on a number of the themes in the book.

On human nature

Maryanski and Turner note that "many sociologists reject the idea of talking about human nature, even as they incorporate untested assumptions about human needs". The authors insist that by ignoring biology, "we miss important insights that can add a great deal to sociological explanations". They appealingly suggest that we view human nature as "a weak but persistent pressure, manifesting itself as individual preferences or a sine qua non to behave in certain ways". These "subtle and persistent pressures from humans’ biological nature have always been present", they write, "pushing sociocultural formations toward those more compatible with humans’ ape ancestry". After all, humans are animals that evolved like all other animals, and

... despite the spectacular, if not dangerous, cultural systems and social structures that our large brains allow us to construct, these do not obviate the influence of biology on human behaviour and social organization, now or in the distant past.

On individualism

The authors point out that "even with some hardwired bioprogrammers for sociality, there can be little doubt that the great apes (and the common ancestors of the great apes and hominids) revealed clear behavioral propensities for individuality". Humans are "programmed to feel comfortable in fluid, weak-tie groups". They further note that humans are indeed "far more individualistic than many sociologists feel comfortable admitting, given their collectivist ideological biases". Interestingly, the conflict between individualism and collectivism may, they think, "be lodged in human neuroanatomy, as much as in cultural ideologies" and that, "given a choice, humans appear to gravitate to sociocultural formations that give them choice and options".

On social cages

The history of human societies is, in many ways, a history of constraints imposed on individuals. Maryanski and Turner call these (systems of) constraints "social cages". They stress that there was not just one social cage, but many, and that they were often successively embedded in each other. They talk about the cages of kinship and power:

• The cage of kinship was based on kinship-units like nuclear families, lineages, clans, phratries, and moieties, successively encompassing the entire population and leading to individuals being "trapped in a web of kinfolk".
• This cage of kinship was eventually replaced the cage of power. A bureaucratic structure was first superimposed over the kin-based structure, eventually replacing the kinship system with a more bureaucratized state.

These social cages came increasingly in conflict with human nature as they

... limited individualism and mobility, imposed pervasive systems of authority from which there was no escape, and converted community into yet another cage that restricted rather than facilitated individualism and free movement.

On the evolution of the state 

Once the economy could generate a surplus of resources over and above those needed for survival, this surplus could be taxed. As power was consolidated and centralized, more of the economic surplus was usurped and used to support elite privilege and repress dissent over the perceived unfairness. Ideologies are employed to legitimate the power of leaders and to convince subordinates of their obligations to conform. Religious beliefs also began to legitimate power, with leaders being seen as god-like or as sanctioned by the supernatural. Religious elites often entered into "unholy" alliances with political elites to justify and legitimate the use of political power to maintain elite privilege.

Later on, law was also used as a more secular alternative to religious edicts to increase the power of the state: "law increasingly gave polity the rights to regulate and control. When law was effective, it could bestow legitimacy on the state".

The authors emphasize that once political leadership was given, it could not so easily be taken away. Once consolidation of power was initiated, "it continued because those with power used their power to gain more power". As the state evolved, the options of individuals to escape the cage of power declined. They may have migrated when possible, "but they typically left one cage and entered another".

In the end, it remains somewhat unclear whether they see government as arising as a response to some societal need, or if governments took control simply because they could. They repeatedly talk about governments growing in response to "selection pressures from regulation", but never explain what they mean in detail.

On capitalism 

It was possible to see trends that provided an escape from the many social cages which humans had been forced to live in: "The most significant trend revolved around the gradual expansion of economic activity outside the landed estates and the rise of markets". Over time, this emerging capitalist system "changed people’s cognitive orientations and beliefs, leading them to believe that it was their right to pursue, as individuals, the opportunities generated by markets."

A capitalist system [was] preferable to an evolved ape [over] the feudal system [with its] subordination to elites on landed estates [and] to clergy bent on controlling the masses for their own power and privilege.

However, Maryanski and Turner also think that capitalism was guilty of some “horrific early abuses”, mentioning the “truly degrading conditions” under which people had to work in factories during the early days of industrialism. The only reference provided for this claim is a quote by Friedrich Engels (sic)!

On money

Maryanski and Turner point out that governments "increasingly had a vested interest in controlling the coinage of money and its viability in markets generating the wealth needed to finance government and elite privilege". Indeed, money became yet another aspect of the symbolic base of political power.  

I recently listened to a podcast from Econtalk in which George Selgin talks about this subject. In his book The Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply Under Competitive Note Issue, Selgin writes

States monopolized their coinage early in history. But this does not mean that they were the best makers of coin or that coinage is a natural monopoly. Rather, state coinage monopolies were established by force. Once rulers had set up their own mints they prohibited private issues, making their coins both a symbol of their rule and a source of profits.

On democracy

Maryanski and Turner also argue that as markets grew and as more people in a society "became part of the market system as consumers, wage earners, or capitalists (large and small)", pressures thereby increased for new democratic forms of politics: 

Once individuals have choices in new arenas within the economy, they begin to seek choices in political leaders [and in doing so] they begin to exercise resistance to the cage of power.

They point out that "humans have a desire to determine who their leaders will be and to have some ability to limit the power of these leaders". But they fail to note that, in a democracy, some people inevitably choses for others, which obviously entails that, in fact, only some will determine who their leaders will be, while most will be ruled by the leaders chosen by others. 

On inequality

Another slightly annoying aspect of their discussion is that they seldom distinguish between inequality of wealth and inequality of political power. They rightly point out that humans have a strong propensity to want to limit the power of dominants (as can be seen in hunter-gatherer societies, for example). But, as Rubin argued, this propensity is useful only when applied to power and it becomes wasteful and counterproductive when applied to material inequality. I think that Maryanski and Turner could learn a lot from Rubin's book in general, but their own book is worth reading as a compliment. 

The Myth of The Rational Voter - Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

... now that democracy is the typical form of government, there is little reason to dwell on the truisms that it is "better than Communism," or "beats life during the Middle Ages". Such comparisons set the bar too low. It is more worthwhile to figure out how and why democracy disappoints. In the minds of many, one of Winston Churchill's most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." But this saying overlooks the fact that governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets. Democracy enthusiasts repeatedly acknowledge this. When they lament the "weakening of democracy", their main evidence is that markets face little government oversight, or even usurp traditional functions of government. They often close with a "wake-up call" for voters to shrug off their apathy and make their voice heard. The heretical thought that rarely surfaces is that weakening democracy in favor of markets could be a good thing. No matter what you believe about how well markets work in absolute terms, if democracy starts to look worse, markets start to look better by comparison.  

Bryan Caplan's book is a lucid and powerful economic analysis of democracy. Caplan draws on results from economics, history, (evolutionary) psychology, philosophy and political science to make a compelling case for his thesis. Economic issues are at the top of the political agenda and Caplan provides strong empirical evidence that voters have systematically biased beliefs about economics. The beliefs of the median voter manifest the following biases:

• "Anti-market bias" (a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of the market mechanism)
• "Anti-foreign bias" (a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of interaction with foreigners)
• "Make-work bias" (a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor) and
• "Pessimistic bias" (a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the (recent) past, present, and future performance of the economy)

As a result, voters chose bad policies. And contrary to common opinion, voters mostly get what they ask for, Caplan argues. The common analyses of the failures of democracy usually blame self-interested voters, powerful special interest groups and/or the media. But the empirical evidence tells us that voters qua voters are not self-interested. They generally vote for what they perceive as the common good, but they are deeply deluded about which policies would bring about the desired outcome. Special interest groups do have some influence, but only at the margins of public opinion. If politicians disregarded the voters in favour of special interest groups to a significant degree, they would soon be voted out of office. The media is also not in the driver's seat, it merely tells the people what they want to hear. Any news media that did otherwise would soon go out of business. The upshot is that democracy does not fail because it somehow fails to give the voters what they want - it fails precisely because it gives the voters what they want. The painful realization, for many, is that what voters want is often not very sensible!

However, politicians and bureaucrats have some "wiggle room" at the margins of public opinion which they can use to defuse the worst effects of the biases of the voters. If public policy was even more closely matched with what the voting public wants than it actually is, economic policy would be worse, not better. This can explain why, in the face of the fundamental flaws of democracy, economic policy is not as bad as it could be. If everyone voted, policy would be a disaster (as the median non-voter is even more biased than the median voter)! Thus, despite the wishful thinking of what Caplan calls the "democratic fundamentalists", the problems of democracy cannot be "fixed" by more democracy. Indeed, what we need is less, not more, democracy. The obsession with voter turnout and campaigns to encourage people to vote are misguided and even dangerous.  

Caplan argues that people have preferences over beliefs and that giving up our cherished ideological beliefs involves a certain kind of psychological pain. Given the extremely remote possibility that any one vote affects the outcome of an election, it is much less costly for the individual to indulge in ideology than to think rationally about politics. Thus, otherwise rational individuals can be irrational when it comes to politics. And the social cost is substantial. There is much more to Caplan's analysis which deserves careful attention.

The four biases listed above probably have an innate basis, as Caplan acknowledges. Humans are natural pessimists despite rational reasons for optimism; humans are naturally sceptical about foreigners despite overwhelming evidence that international trade and immigration benefits all. A large part of the explanation can be that we evolved in a zero-sum world with little or no possibilities for mutually beneficial trade. As pointed out in an excellent podcast from EconTalk (in which Caplan talks about The Myth of the Rational Voter) the front cover of the book (representing voters as a bunch of sheep) is misleadingly optimistic: "Sheep could converge on a good idea, but around the world and over time, there is a persistent tendency to select economically bad policies. Over time and across countries, stories seem very similar." It is thus not true that people are easily led in general. They are easily led only in certain directions and much harder to lead in other directions because of innate predispositions. People are not blank slates equally open to economic enlightenment as they are to economic fallacies. Rather, they come pre-equipped with various biases that must somehow be unlearned. Economic insights can be learned, of course, but they don't come naturally to people.

Also in the podcast, Caplan stresses that democracy is an ideology, a secular religion. He says that "politics is the religion of modernity". The analogy between politics and religion is apt and can be part of the explanation for why there is so much dogmatism in politics and why people so easily become offended when their favoured views are challenged. 

The Myth of the Rational Voter is a deeply insightful and profoundly important book. Caplan has provided a sobering and much needed analysis of the political system whose virtues have been naively taken for granted for too long - even by those who should know better.  

The Better Angels of our Nature - Why Violence Has Declined

Thomas Hobbes’ idea of a social contract arising from a state of nature, Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection, and Adam Smith's idea that people concerned primarily with their own personal interests will cater to the needs of others in a way that is highly beneficial for all, are surely three of the most important ideas of all time. In more recent times these ideas have been refined and enhanced by applications of results from game theory, genetics and economics. Steven Pinker makes heavy use of all three of these powerful ideas in this massive new treatise on violence.

Over some 800 pages, Pinker explains the historical and psychological origins of violent behavior tracing it back to its evolutionary roots in our pre-human ancestors and follows it up to the present day. He covers everything from cruelty to animals and the spanking of children to genocide and nuclear wars. His main claim is that violence has declined significantly over millennia, centuries and decades and that, contrary to common opinion, we now live in the most peaceful time so far in all of history. The reason why many people today tend to think differently is also given a compelling psychological explanation, the gist of which is that we are much more sensitive to violence now than we ever were in the past. Also, the media naturally tends to report violent crimes rather than their absence.   

But while the overt agenda of the book is to explain violence (how it is rooted in our human nature and how it has been possible for us to decrease it as much as we have given that human nature has not changed fundamentally), the covert agenda is to make a case for peace. Specifically, Pinker makes an excellent case for civilisation in general and liberal humanism and (scientific, technical, economic, social and moral) progress in particular. It might seem strange to call such a large book covering such a vast topic and time period modest, but Pinker is indeed very careful and humble in his claims and even more so in his predictions for the future.

Today violence might be thought of as only one among many important aspects of social life, but it is actually central to human coexistence. It is the very core of politics and the central subject matter of social and political philosophy. This is however not a work in political philosophy as such, but it is an excellent overview of the empirical background of which any reasonable political theory must take note.  

In many ways, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a continuation and expansion of the chapter on violence in Pinker’s previous book, The Blank Slate, and it also revisits several other themes from that earlier work including, of course, further debunking of the myth of the noble savage. But here also the myth of "pure evil" is debunked: human nature contains both “inner demons” that incline us toward violence and “better angels” that incline us toward peace. Given that human nature has not changed fundamentally, something in our environment must be the primary cause of the decline of violence. Candidates include the rise of governments, the emergence of “gentle commerce” (aka trade), the greater influence of women (men are biologically more prone to violence than women), Peter Singer’s idea of “the expanding circle” and a general increase in abstract reasoning.

Civilization, modernity and the spreading of the ideas of enlightenment humanism (which Pinker associates with Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Smith, Mill among others and notes that it is “also sometimes called classical liberalism, though since the 1960s the word liberalism has acquired other meanings as well”) is praised. Among the culprits, on the other hand, one sticks out: ideology. Utopian ideologies that promise a future paradise (like Marxism, Nazism, Christianity and Islam) have been major forces for violence and led to many mass killings throughout history. Pinker notes that religion also can be a force for peace, but this has been so only when the religion in question has been influenced by humanist ideas.

While he does not take that many explicit stances in the book, it becomes clear that Pinker is more of a liberal than a conservative; more of a classical liberal than a contemporary liberal; more of a democrat than an authoritarian; more of a "progressive" than a reactionary; more of an atheist (or possibly deist) than a "man of god"; more of a sceptic than a dogmatic; more of an empiricist than a rationalist; more of an optimist than an alarmist; more of a Humean than a Kantian (even if some parts are heavily influenced by the latter). It remains unclear though, whether he is more of a social contract theorist than a utilitarian. He relies heavily on Hobbes in major parts of the book, but he does also occasionally speak positively about "the greatest happiness for the greatest number".

There are simply too many interesting points in this book to comment on them all, so let me focus on what he says about government and democracy. Pinker follows Hobbes in thinking that organised government – the establishment of a Leviathan – was a major force for peace. But Pinker would not support a sovereign with absolute power like Hobbes did. He acknowledges that

When it came to violence, then, the first Leviathans solved one problem but created another. People were less likely to become victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptocrats. This gives a sinister sense of the word pacification: not just the bringing about of peace but the imposition of absolute control by a coercive government. Solving this second problem would have to wait another few millennia, and in much of the world it remains unsolved to this day.   

That government is generally more conducive to peace than anarchy in the pejorative sense of that term (meaning disorder) is rather trivial. But whether order is possible without government is an open debate. Pinker notes that

Libertarians, anarchists, and other sceptics of the Leviathan point out that when communities are left to their own devices, they often develop norms of cooperation that allow them to settle their disputes non-violently, without laws, police, courts, or the other trappings of government.

He goes on to cite the legal scholar Robert Ellickson’s work Order Without Law: How Neighbours Settle Disputes and concludes that

As important as tacit norms are, it would be a mistake to think that they obviate a role for government. The Shasta County ranchers [one of Ellickson’s objects of study] may not have called in Leviathan when a cow knocked over a fence, but they were living in its shadow and knew it would step in if their informal sanctions escalated or if something bigger were at stake, such as a fight, a killing, or a dispute over women.

It is admirable that Pinker acknowledges the existence of anarchist perspectives (as they are often unfairly ignored), but he does not further acknowledge the growing literature on individualist and libertarian anarchism. For an excellent introduction to this overlooked literature, see Edward P. Stringham’s Anarchy and the Law - an impressive volume that compiles essays and excerpts from books by major thinkers on the topic of ordered anarchy (including an excerpt from Ellickson’s work). If you want a more strictly philosophical treatment of the subject, try John T. Sanders' and Jan Narveson's anthology For and Against the State. 

Pinker sometimes uses laws (against slavery, public executions, etc.) as examples of progress, but perhaps he should have pointed out more clearly that changes in general attitude came first and the new laws came after. Let me quote David Friedman emphasising this point:

The modern liberal will claim that it was state legislation, limiting hours, preventing child labor, imposing safety regulations, and otherwise violating the principle of laissez faire, that brought progress. But the evidence indicates that the legislation consistently followed progress rather than preceding it. It was only when most workers were already down to a ten-hour day that it became politically possible to legislate one.

Furthermore, as Robert Sugden says in his The Economics of Rights, Cooperation and Welfare on the subject:

Wise governments do not risk losing credibility by passing laws that cannot be enforced; and when such laws are passed, wise police forces turn a blind eye to violations of them. […] One implication of this is that governments must, if only as a matter of prudence, take some account of the possibility that the laws they might wish to pass may be unenforceable. The willingness or unwillingness of individuals to obey the law is a constraint on the government’s freedom of action. […] it may be that some important aspects of the law merely formalize and codify conventions of behaviour that have evolved out of essentially anarchic situations […] the law may reflect codes of behaviour that most individuals impose on themselves.

The historical processes that Pinker calls "the civilizing process", "the humanitarian revolution" and "the rights revolutions" cannot possibly have been driven by laws. Instead, laws are symptoms of these processes. I’m sure Pinker would agree, and he does indeed identify independent causes for all of these processes.

The “solution” that Pinker hinted at to the problem of government tyranny is (not surprisingly) democracy. But it is highly questionable whether democracy really solves anything at all as was noted long ago by Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and many others. Pinker extensively quotes Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace and rightly notes that Kant associated the word 'democracy' with mob rule. In this essay, Kant said that

... democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which "all" decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, "all," who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.

That liberal democratic government is more conducible to peace than authoritarian dictatorship is one thing, but as Bryan Caplan argues in his The Myth of the Rational Voter this sets the bar too low. Caplan says further that

In the minds of many, one of Winston Churchill’s most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. But this saying overlooks the fact that governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets.

Pinker is well aware of this and supports both what he calls “the democratic peace” and the “capitalist peace” that together make up “the liberal peace”.

The Better Angels of Our Nature is simply an excellent synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a very wide range of relevant disciplines, presented in a way that make these results accessible despite the book's considerable length.

The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature

In this important book, Steven Pinker makes a compelling case against three persistent and mutually interconnected myths that he calls “the blank slate”, “the ghost in the machine” and “the noble savage” respectively. The first is the idea that we are all born “empty”. That is, without any innate features. The second covers the idea of a (immaterial) “soul”, the idea or a (contra-causal) “free will”, and the idea of a “me” as something over and above brain and body. The third is the idea associated with Rousseau that man is a peaceful and moral being in his natural state, and that he has somehow been corrupted by society. Collectively, he calls the three ideas “the holy trinity” (but unholy trinity would perhaps be a better term!). In every case, Pinker shows that these ideas (both in their naïve and in their more sophisticated versions) are simply untenable in the light of reason and modern science. He appeals extensively to what he calls the sciences of human nature that include cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology.    

The book has five parts. In the first, Pinker presents the three myths and debunks them. In parts two (Fear and Loathing) and three (Human Nature with a Human Face), he argues that abandoning the blank slate and its two sister ideas is entirely benign and does not deserve neither fear nor loathing nor do they imply or legitimate inequality, imperfectability, determinism or nihilism (in any pernicious senses of these terms). Indeed, he argues that it is the blank slate, the ghost in the machine and the noble savage that are the pernicious (and often socially, politically and scientifically dangerous) ideas. Where one stands in this debate turns out to be highly relevant for the social and political sciences. Pinker is highly critical (and rightly so) of postmodernism, cultural relativism and so-called “radical science” – the preposterous idea to base science on Marxist principles. He is equally critical (and equally rightly) of crude Social Darwinism. Indeed, he shows that utopian political ideologies on the left (Communism) and on the right (Nazism) have a great deal in common (both in theory and in practice). Religious ideologies also share the same type of utopian features that have led to many mass killings in the past.

For some people, Pinker’s message will probably be controversial and provocative (despite Pinker’s subtle and humble prose) while for others it will be obvious and almost trivial. I did read the first three parts of the book with great pleasure, but in honesty I did not need much convincing. In part four, entitled Know Thyself the book moves from agreeable to highly interesting. Chapter 13 in particular should be read by everyone who knows how to read! Here, Pinker points out that there may be a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today.

Our minds keep us in touch with aspects of reality – such as objects, animals, and people – that our ancestors dealt with for millions of years. But as science and technology open up new and hidden worlds, our untutored intuitions may find themselves at sea.

These ways of knowing and core intuitions are suitable for a lifestyle of small groups of illiterate, stateless people who live off the land, survive by their wits, and depend on what they can carry. Our ancestors left this lifestyle for a settled existence only a few millennia ago, too recently for evolution to have done much, if anything, to our brains. Conspicuous by their absence are faculties suited to the stunning new understanding of the world wrought by science and technology. For many domains of knowledge, the mind could not have developed dedicated machinery, the brain and genome show no hints of specialization, and people show no spontaneous intuitive understanding either in the crib or afterward. They include modern physics, cosmology, genetics, evolution, neuroscience, embryology, economics, and mathematics. It’s not just that we have to go to school or read books to learn these subjects. It’s that we have no mental tools to grasp them intuitively.

Therefore:

Understanding in these domains is likely to be uneven, shallow, and contaminated by primitive intuitions. And that can shape debates in the border disputes in which science and technology make contact with everyday life. […] with all the moral, empirical, and political factors that go into these debates, we should add the cognitive factors: the way our minds naturally frame issues. Our own cognitive makeup is a missing piece of many puzzles, including education, bioethics, food safety, economics, and human understanding itself.

Pinker then goes on to discuss just these things in more detail. We are not cognitively well equipped to understand modern science. The blank slate and the noble savage leads to bad policies regarding education and the treatment of criminals; the ghost in the machine distorts debates about abortion and euthanasia; “essentialist” beliefs lead to irrational fears of artificial and genetically modified foods, etc. There are simply too many interesting points here to comment on, but let me focus on our “intuitive economics” for a while. Pinker points out first that people are prone to commit “the physical fallacy”: “the belief that an object has a true and constant value, as opposed to being worth only what someone is willing to pay for it at a given place and time”.

The belief that goods [and, I would like to add, services] have a “just price” implies that it is avaricious to charge anything higher, and the result has been mandatory pricing schemes in medieval times, communist regimes, and many Third World countries [as well as minimum wage laws in many countries today]. Such attempts to work around the law of supply and demand have usually led to waste, shortages, and black markets.

The same fallacy is involved in the (stupid) practice of outlawing interest. Pinker points out that the reason why people borrow money at one time to repay it at another is that the money is worth more to them at the time they borrow it than it will be at the time they repay it. “So when regimes enact sweeping usury laws, people who could put money to productive use cannot get it, and everyone’s standard of living go down.” This is, of course, old news to say the least. What might be new is that we now can show why people still have these counterproductive biases centuries after they were first identifies as clear examples of economic fallacies; simply, human beings make bad economists.

Because money lenders and middlemen do not cause tangible objects to come into being, their contributions are difficult for us to grasp, and these productive actors are perceived as parasites and skimmers. Pinker further points out that “ghettoization, confiscation, expulsion, and mob violence against middlemen, often ethnic minorities who learned to specialize in the middleman niche” is a recurring and tragic theme in human history.  The Jews in Europe is a familiar example. One obvious way to counteract the cognitive biases with which we are born is education and Pinker concludes that a modern education should give high priority to economics, evolutionary biology, probability theory and statistics. I would like to add critical thinking and argumentation analysis to his list.

Another all too common and tragic human fallacy is that of Malthus; that natural resources will run out as our populations grow larger. Pinker writes that:

The immediate problem with Malthusian prophecies is that they underestimate the effects of technological change in increasing the resources that support a comfortable life. […] needs don’t have to be satisfied by increasing the availability of physical resources. They can be satisfied by using new ideas – recipes, designs, or techniques – to rearrange existing resources to yield more of what we want.

At least in principle, the exponential power of human cognition works on the same scale as the growth of the human population, and we can resolve the paradox of the Malthusian disaster that never happened.

As Pinker wisely points out, this does not license complacency. But it does show “that our understanding of humans’ relation to the material world has to acknowledge not just our bodies and our resources but also our minds”. Again, that Malthus was wrong is not news at all. The puzzle is thus not that the Malthusian disaster has not happened the puzzle is rather that people still widely commit the same fallacy over and over, often in the face of having had it pointed out to them more than once. The first step towards a solution is to resolve this latter puzzle. And we can begin to do so by raising awareness of the reason for which we commit such fallacies: we are prone to do so in virtue of our human nature; in virtue of innate mental faculties that evolved in a time very different from that of the modern world in which we now live.   

Another thing that Pinker discusses is equality. He observes that

It is a brute fact that greater rewards will go to people with greater inborn talent if other people are willing to pay more for the fruits of those talents. The only way that cannot happen is if people are locked into arbitrary castes, if all economic transactions are controlled by the state, or if there is no such thing as inborn talent because we are blank slates.

He quotes Hayek saying that if we treat people equally the result must be material inequality and that the only way to get material equality is to treat people differently - equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different but in conflict with each other. Examples of unequal treatment in the name of equality mentioned by Pinker are progressive taxes on the rich, quotas that favor certain races, prohibitions against private medical care or other voluntary transactions. Pinker notes that Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Robert Nozick have made similar points. One could add to this that this is the reason why equality of opportunity is an impossible and therefore spurious ideal. The only way to realize equality of opportunity would be to make it the case that we are all identical both in innate talent and in our environment, which would require (if it is possible at all) extremely draconian measures. Indeed, Pinker points out that many atrocities have been committed in the name of egalitarianism, “targeting people whose success was taken as evidence of their criminality”.

To continue further on this line of thought, we ought to conclude that the only ideal of equality that is realistic given the kind of creatures we are and the kind of world in which we live is that of equal (negative) rights (that is, the equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, as it is often called). Since innate talents (and luck) are unequally distributed, equal rights will inevitably lead to material inequality. This we will have to live with. But not only is this something that we have to live with, in a free market economy (in virtue of its positive-sum nature) it is better for all of us as talented people will use their talents to provide goods and services that otherwise would not exist.

It would be a mistake though to think that Pinker is arguing for libertarianism. He argues only that

A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is inherent to all political systems and that the major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend there is no tradeoff. [Knowledge about innate differences among people] might help us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner.

Indeed, he is concerned to show that insights from the sciences of human nature are compatible with a progressive politics (referring to Peter Singer’s book A Darwinian Left in chapter 16) and feminism (in chapter 18) and does not, by itself, lead to or legitimate discrimination. He is concerned to show that progressive politics and feminism are not necessarily in opposition to the application of evolution, genetics and neuroscience to the human mind despite being seen as such in much of modern intellectual life. He admirably points out, though, that discrimination is not always wrong. One could add that discrimination is a necessary component of all choice and that prohibiting some discrimination is equivalent to reducing choice. The fact that people sometimes make choices on grounds that in others’ eyes are not the best ones does not automatically give them the right to restrict their freedom of choice. Insofar as we are liberals in the broad sense, we ought to acknowledge that any person has the right to make choices on whatever grounds she sees fit (without restricting the similar rights of others). Pinker does not explicitly embrace this view, presumable since he wisely does not want to commit himself to any controversial claims over and above the main theses of the book. 

In chapter 15, Pinker talks about our moral sense. He says that

The design of the moral sense leaves people in all cultures vulnerable to confusing defensible moral judgments with irrelevant passions and prejudices.

Such irrelevant passions and prejudices can, he argues, lead people to condemn so-called “victimless crimes”. He does not, however, apply this latter insight to the abovementioned tradeoff between freedom and equality. I think we can say more than just that we will have to make a tradeoff between equality and freedom. A large part of the intuitive appeal of equality is, I take it, based on just such “irrelevant passions and prejudices” that are present in our innate moral sense, primarily envy. Once we see this, I think, the (substantial) ideal equality loses much of its appeal.

Overall, this is a rich and significant book full of important insights into human nature. We can no longer pretend as if these insights into who we are does not bear on a whole range of moral, social, political and scientific issues.