Beneath the Surface

“No natural or human science has been unaffected by these technical and theoretical transformations. Precisely how each scientific discourse relates to these historical changes is a matter for detailed study; it is certain the connections will not often be direct or simple. But it is a striking fact that the formal theory of nature embodied in sociobiology is structurally like advanced capitalist theories of investment management, control systems for labour, and insurance practices based on population disciplines. Furthermore, sociobiology, like all modern biologies, studies a control machine as its central object. Nature is structured as a series of interlocking cybernetic systems, which are theorized as communications problems. Nature has been systematically constituted in terms of the capitalist machine and marker. Let us first look at the market. 

The market is best approached in terms of the history of the concept of natural selection. Contemporaries realized that a Darwinian natural economy, the competitive struggle for all against all for profit, suggested troubling parallels to political economy. Darwin himself realized his debt to Thomas Malthus; scarcity was the motor of nature as well as of history (Malthus, 1798, pp. 26-30, 73-5, 98). Biological populations increased at a rate that guaranteed permanent scarcity, as well as permanent technical improvement in the means of production. Progress and scarcity were the twin forces in capitalist development. Reproduction of biological organisms seemed the basic process in both nature and history, and reproduction was inherently competitive. Scarcity seemed inevitably linked to a natural process, and not to a historical limiting form of appropriation of the product of human production. Reproduction, not production, seemed the proper focus for a natural science of society. Similarly, as Marx noted, bourgeois political economists focused on equal and competitive exchange in the market, while obscuring the relations of domination in production. Those relations were enforced by particular mechanisms (including technology) which were designed to transfer the locus of control away from the worker. All of this is familiar. From this point of view, sociobiology is merely an extension and development of the theory of natural selection. 

Sociobiology (Wilson, 1975, p. 10) is a biological understanding of groups - societies and populations. As for all capitalist science, the fundamental problem needing explanation is the combination of individuals for the common good. From a starting point of atomic individualism, reproduced in Darwin’s theory of natural selection, altruism needed explanation; it seemed an irrationality for a consistent theory of selection. Altruism in sociobiology is defined as ‘self-destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others’ (Wilson, 1975, p. 578). How could individuals profit in the long run, if they wasted time and courted danger in self-destructive generosity? The problem seemed particularly acute in the most advanced natural societies - social insects and non-human primates, not to mention human orders. Sociobiology’s solution is the quantitatively sophisticated extension of natural selection and population genetics, producing the notion of ‘inclusive fitness: the sum of an individual’s own fitness plus all its influence on fitness in its relatives other than direct descendants; hence the total effect of kin selection with reference to an individual’ (Wilson, 1975, p. 586).

The ideas related to inclusive fitness - kin selection, sexual selection, parental investment - permitted a refocusing of an old argument; that is to say, at what level can selection occur (Wynne-Edwards, 1962; Trivers, 1971, 1972)? In particular, can the social group be the locus of selection? If so, is the group a kind of superorganism, physiologically as well as genetically analogous to an individual? The answer for sociobiology is no. Or rather those suggestions no longer make sense. The genetic calculus of sociobiology concerns maximization strategies of genes and combinations of genes. All sorts of phenomenal orders are possible, from asexual individuals to cast-structured insect societies with only one reproductive pair, to role-diversified  societies with many reproducing members. None of these orders is the central object of concern. That noumenal object is the gene, called by Richard Dawkins the ‘replicator’, within the gene pool. Sociobiology analyses all behaviour in terms of the ultimate level of explanation, the genetic market place.”

...

“The theoretical view of nature underlying genetic engineering and bioethics as a kind of quality control industry appears clearly in sociobiology. On Human Nature emphasizes constraints and deeply established trajectories, but there is no logical, much less moral, barrier to a full engineering approach to outmoded systems. In that sense, the status quo rationalizations of the book, though extensive and explicitly sexist, racist and classist, are on the surface. The foundation of sociobiology is a capitalist and patriarchal analysis of nature, which requires domination, but is very innovative about its forms. The limits of engineering redesign in sociobiology are set by the capitalist dynamic of private appropriation of value and the consequent need for a precise teleology of domination. The fundamental sexism is less in rationalization of sex roles as genetically predisposed, than in the basic engineering logic of ‘human’ domination of ‘nature’. The humanism of sociobiology which Wilson correctly cites in his defence, is precisely the core of his science’s sexism. In addition of course, sociobiological reasoning applied to human societies easily glides into facile naturalization of job segregation, dominance hierarchies, racial chauvinism, and the ‘necessity’ of domination in sexually based societies to control the nastier aspects of genetic competition. But, ironically, sociobiology is probably less tied to explicit sexism and racism than psychobiology and other organic functionalist biologies were. Sociobiology is a radical engineering science which can readily cleanse its objects of obsolescent flaws in natural design.”

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“In an important sense, science, like capital, has been progressive. The computer is not just a machine built according to laws of domination related to labour and war. Communications sciences, including sociobiology, are human achievements in interaction with the world. But the construction of a natural economy according to capitalist relations, and its appropriation for purposes of reproducing domination, is deep. It is at the level of fundamental theory and practice, not at the level of good guys and bad guys. 

A socialist-feminist science will have to be developed in the process of constructing different lives in interaction with the world. Only material struggle can end the logic of domination. Marx insisted that one must not leap too fast, or one will end in a fantastic utopia, impotent and ignorant. Abundance matters. In fact, abundance is essential to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature. It matters whether we make ourselves in plenty or in unfulfilled need, including need for genuine knowledge and meaning. But natural history - and its offspring, the biological sciences - has been a discipline based on scarcity. Nature, including human nature, has been theorized and developed through the construction of life science in and for capitalism and patriarchy. That is part of the maintenance of scarcity in the specific form of appropriation of abundance for private and not common good. It is also part of the maintenance of domination in the form of escalating logics and technologies of command-control systems fundamental to patriarchy. To the extent that these practices inform our theorizing of nature, we are still ignorant and must engage in the practice of science. It is a matter for struggle. I do not know what life science would be like if the historical structure of our lives minimized domination. I do know that the history of biology convinces me that basic knowledge would reflect and reproduce the new world, just as it has participated in maintaining an old one.”

“What does it mean if, amid this intensely personal journey of defining who we are, this often critical way in which we anchor our sense of self, there exists even a single person on this planet who has reached that state of resolution as a result of peculiar neurotransmitter levels?

This is the same disquieting point where we began this volume, a similar type of question that was posed toward the end of the first piece, “How Big Is Yours?” with its tour of frontal disinhibition syndromes, Tourette’s, OCD, and other neuropsychiatric disorders. What will it mean as we learn about deterministic factors influencing what makes us who we are - how and whether we go about being religious, whether we take pleasure in novelty or in familiarity, how readily we speak our minds, whether our bent is toward monogamy or infidelity, and what the gender is of the person around whom these issues of faithfulness resolve? And the intervening pieces in this volume have simply added further to this question - what does it mean that there are biological constraints to how we move through our life histories, to how we go about some of our most personal junctures such as mourning? What do we make of the fact that at point after point, our traits prove us to be nothing more than a not-terribly-unique form of primate?

At the end of “How Big Is Yours?” I posed this question and tried to frame some of my own answers relevant to the societal or political implications of the biology of our behavior. What does it all mean? For one thing, that we must forever be on guard against the ideologues who would distort this science to design and justify the next holocaust. And it means that we must recognize that this science of what constraints and links us all into similar patterns should be a rallying point for our being more empathic, tolerant, and pluralistic, should be a call to recognize new biological realms in which people might need our help. 

But as I’ve lectured to students about these subjects over the years, I’ve seen them become uncomfortable with the implications of this science at various points, and it is rarely because of their wrestling with the sociopolitical implications. Instead, it is the philosophical implications that plague and challenge our sense of who we are. What does it all mean?

It seems to me that people become upset for two related reasons. The first has to do with the sheer complexity of what biology is revealing to us - the stupefying array of neurotransmitters and synaptic connections, the intertwining of interactions between hormones and environment, the dizzying subtlety with which early experience can influence how our bodies work forever after. The problem here is not just that one can easily despair at ever understanding any of this. It’s that this complexity runs counter to an image many of us have about living systems, where life and its processes are thought to unfold with a simplicity free of calculation or design. Natural. And instead, every facet seems the very antithesis of simplicity - where something even as seemingly straightforward as the timing of puberty involves our bodies machinating, ticking off the rules of evolution, monitoring the state of the world around us, adding and subtracting the costs and benefits of each step. All of this brings home a lesson learned by most biologists: To the extent that what we think of “natural” as effortless, unplanned, unaffected, and simple, it is rarely the nature of our bodies or our behaviors to be natural. We cannot afford such a luxury. 

The more resonant way in which people often become upset at this point has to do with so many of these findings in behavioral biology running counter to an image many of us have about ourselves. There is a pleasure that most of us hold in our breasts, the notion that we are each a mysterious, shimmering flame of uniqueness. And there is the fear that that is precisely what the scientists will try to capture and thus destroy as a result of gaining this sort of knowledge - the image of the never-to-be-seen-again snowflake melting because of the warm breath of someone looking too closely, the image of a unicorn hemmed into a corral, gawked at by crowds oblivious to its sadness and loss. 

This image is also encompassed in the classic Arthur C. Clarke short story “The Nine Billion Names of God.” It is the perfect metaphor for the fear that many people have about where scientific knowledge will lead us and the price it will exact. In the story, Tibetan monks team up with some scientists who possess the most powerful high-speed computer on earth. The goal in their collaboration is to generate the nine billion different names of God posited by Tibetans to exist. And as they come close to obtaining this impossible, unobtainable knowledge, the inevitable happens: the stars in the sky begin to fade. 

This is what many people fear, that scientists, as they learn more and more about less and less, will inadvertently go and explain everything, will turn us with their knowledge into sterile assemblages of molecules and networks and equations, and that with each new fact accrued, another light in the heavens will be extinguished. 

I do not worry about this. This is not because I am an unemotional scientist just intent on reaching that holy grail of turning dancing flames into equations. I am a reasonable emotional person and that is central to the science that I do. Yet I am not worried if the scientists inadvertently go and explain everything. This is for a very simple reason: an impala sprinting across the savannah can be reduced to biomechanics, and Bach can be reduced to counterpoint, yet that does not decrease one iota our ability to shiver as we experience impalas leaping or Bach thundering. We can only gain and grow with each discovery that there is structure underlying the most accessible levels of things that fill us with awe. 

But there is an even stronger reason why I am not afraid that scientists will inadvertently go and explain everything - it will never happen. While in certain realms, it may prove to be the case that science could explain anything, it will never explain everything. As should be obvious after all these pages, as part of the scientific process, for every question answered, a dozen newer ones are generated. And they are usually far more puzzling, more challenging that the prior problems. This was stated wonderfully in a quote by a geneticist named Haldane earlier in this century: “Life is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” We will never have our flames extinguished by knowledge. The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.”

“Of all the reasons that we fail to know the truth about mass incarceration, though, one stands out: a profound misunderstanding regarding how racial oppression actually works. If someone were to visit the United States from another country (or another planet) and ask: Is the U.S. criminal justice system some kind of tool of racial control? Most Americans would swiftly deny it. Numerous reasons would leap to mind why that could not possibly be the case. The visitor would be told that crime rates, black culture, or bad schools were to blame. “The system is not run by a bunch of racists,” the apologist would explain. “It’s run by people who are trying to fight crime.” That response is predictable because most people assume that racism, and racial systems generally, are fundamentally a function of attitudes. Because mass incarceration is officially colorblind, it seems inconceivable that the system could function much like a racial caste system. The widespread and mistaken belief that racial animus is necessary for the creation and maintenance of racialized systems of social control is the most important reason that we, as a nation, have remained in deep denial. 

The misunderstanding is not surprising. As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners - and wished them well - nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. Many whites who supported Jim Crow justified it on paternalist grounds, actually believing they were doing blacks a favor or believing the time was not yet “right” for equality. The disturbing images from the Jim Crow era also make it easy to forget that many African Americans were complicit in the Jim crow system, profiting from it directly or indirectly or keeping their objections quiet out of fear of the repercussions. Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system. 

The unfortunate reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape. 

What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices -ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination - trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage. 

Fortunately, as Marilyn Frye has noted, every birdcage has a door, and every birdcage can be broken and can corrode. What is most concerning about the new racial caste system, however, is that it may prove to be more durable than its predecessors. Because this new system is not explicitly based on race, it is easier to defend on seemingly neutral grounds. And while all previous methods of control have blamed the victim in one way or another, the current system invites observers to imagine that those who are trapped in the system were free to avoid second-class status or permanent banishment from society simply by choosing not to commit crimes. It is far more convenient to imagine that a majority of young African American men in urban areas freely chose a life of crime than to accept the real possibility that their lives were structured in a way that virtually guaranteed their early admission in to a system from which they can never escape. Most people are willing to acknowledge the existence of the cage but insist that a door has been left open. 

“When Charu Mazumdar famously said, ‘China’s chairman is our chairman and China’s path is our path,’ he was prepared to extend it to the point where the Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya Khan committed genocide in the East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Because, at the time, China was an ally of Pakistan. There was silence too over the Khmer Rouge and its killing fields in Cambodia. There was silence over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Silence over Tibet. Within the Naxalite movement too, there have been violent excesses and it’s impossible to defend much of what they’ve done. But can anything they have done compare with the sordid achievements of the Congress and the BJP in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat.... And yet, despite these terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar, in much of what he wrote and said, was a man with a political vision for India that cannot be dismissed lightly. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone we cannot judge him too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of ‘the non-violent way’ and his notion of Trusteeship: ‘The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society.’

How strange it is though, that the contemporary tsars of the Indian Establishment - the State that crushed the Naxalites so mercilessly - should now be saying what Charu Mazumdar said so long ago: China’s Path is Our Path. 

Upside Down. Inside Out. 

China’s Path has changed. China is on its way to becoming an imperial power now, fuelled by the raw materials of other countries. But the Party is still right, only, the Party has changed its mind. 

When the Party is a suitor (as it is now in Dandakaranya), wooing the people, attentive to their every need, then it genuinely is a People’s Party, its army genuinely a People’s Army. But after the Revolution, how easily this love affair can turn into a bitter marriage. How easily the People’s Army can turn upon the people. Today in Dandakaranya, the Party wants to keep the bauxite in the mountain. Tomorrow will it change its mind? But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

...

I lie awake on my jhilli, thinking of Maase’s protracted sadness, listening to the drums and the sounds of protracted happiness from the grounds, and thinking about Charu Mazumdar’s idea of protracted war, the central precept of the Maoist Party. This is what makes people think the Maoists’ offer to enter ‘peace talks’ is a hoax, a ploy to get breathing space to regroup, rearm themselves and go back to waging protracted war. What is protracted war? Is it a terrible thing in itself, or does it depend on the nature of the war? What if the people here in Dandakaranya had not waged their protracted war for the last thirty years, where would they be now?

And are the Maoists the only ones who believe in protracted war? Almost from the moment India became a sovereign nation it turned into a colonial power, annexing territory, waging war. It has never hesitated to use military interventions to address political problems - Kashmir, Hyderabad, Goa, Nagaland, Manipur, Telangana, Assam, Punjab, the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and now across the tribal areas of central India. Tens of thousands have been killed with impunity, hundreds of thousands tortured. All of this behind the benign mask of democracy. Who have these wars been waged against? Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Communists, Tribals and, most of all, against the poor, for the most part Dalits, who dare to question their lot instead of accepting the crumbs that are flung at them. It’s hard not to see the Indian State as an essentially upper-caste Hindu State (regardless of which party is in power) which harbours a reflexive hostility towards the ‘other’. One that in true colonial fashion sends the Nagas and Mizos to fight in Chhattisgarh, Sikhs to Kashmir, Kashmiris to Orissa, Tamilians to Assam and so on. If this isn’t protracted war, what is?”

“Early Greek philosophy represented the first conscious search for what was imperishable in the affairs of men. Up to then what was imperishable was within the `domain of the Gods, the myths. But now, as a result of the growing impartiality of the Greeks to the world around them, there was an increasing power of abstraction which permitted them to regard the old Greek mythos not as revealed truth but as imaginative creations of art. This consciousness, which had never existed anywhere before in the world, spelled a whole new level of transcendence for the Greek civilization. 

But the mythos goes on, and that which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos, and the new mythos under the first Ionian philosophers became transmuted into philosophy, which enshrined permanence in a new way. Permanence was no longer the exclusive domain of the Immortal Gods. It was also to be found within Immortal Principles, of which our current law of gravity has become one. 

The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the Immortal Principle fire and introduced challenge as part of the Principle. He said the world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. He said there is a One and there is a Many and the One is the universal law which is immanent in all things. Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as nous, meaning “mind”. 

Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It’s here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, “The Good and the True are not necessarily the same,” and goes its separate ways. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition. 

What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical interventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, “Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover,” and you have to say, “Where were they? Point to them!” And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.”

“If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge. 

About this Einstein had said, “Evolution has shown that any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest,” and let it go at that. But to Phaedrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase “at any given moment” really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!

But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else. 

He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century seem to have a  much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude, you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!