From the
Times Higher Education blog (UK), Matthew Reisz reviews five new books that try to answer the question of What Makes Us Human?
- Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist , professor of anthropology and
biological sciences (Rutgers):
Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others - the American title is The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
- Steven Pinker, department of psychology (Harvard University): The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes
- Daniel Kahneman, emeritus professor of psychology (Princeton
University), winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics: Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Jesse Prinz, distinguished professor of philosophy,CUNY: Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Lives
- Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology, and John Tierney of The New York Times: Willpower: Rediscovering our Greatest Strength
Those are some seriously heavyweight authors for a brief article of this type.
Here is the meat of the article, called
Hearts and Minds:
In all of these books, one can point to moments of stridency and
showmanship, even a pleasure in polemic, which occasionally leads the
authors to try to convince us that black is white. Yet all are dazzling
displays of impassioned scholarship. All combine first-hand research
evidence with jokes, personal anecdotes and references to popular
culture in a way that manages to be entertaining as well as informative.
Kahneman has described Thinking, Fast and Slow as the first of
his books aimed at a mass audience, and all five publications
demonstrate how well many leading academics can communicate with a broad
readership when neither constrained by the research assessment exercise
nor unduly plagued by self-doubt. Read one of them and it is almost
impossible not to be carried away by a sense that one has now grasped
some fundamental truths. The only problem is that they can't all be
right.
Both Kahneman and Trivers believe
we are in some fundamental sense divided against ourselves. The former
notes, for example, that the "heuristics that guide citizens' beliefs
and attitudes are inevitably biased" and can only be overcome by
tremendous effort. Yet he seems fairly relaxed and forgiving about these
flaws: "Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our
beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential." Furthermore, his is
a strikingly chaste book, which probably devotes more space to our
choice of insurance policies than our choice of sexual partners.
Trivers
has a much more tormented view of the world, offers woeful tales of his
women troubles and seems wryly pessimistic about the chances of
self-improvement: "As individuals, we can choose whether to fight our
own self-deceptions or to indulge them. I choose to oppose my own - with
very limited success so far." Furthermore, since he is keen to relate
everything to the core evolutionary issues of survival and reproduction,
he keeps returning to the battle of the sexes. He suspects that the
genes we have inherited from our mothers and those that come from our
fathers are at war with each other - an idea that he confesses first
occurred to him "when I was trying to poison the minds of my three
daughters against their mother's people". Such elaborate arguments about
genes slugging it out within us are precisely the sort of thing that
Prinz is determined to discredit.
Trivers' book is a million miles
away from the can-do spirit of Baumeister and Tierney's, which argues
that "willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can
also be strengthened over the long term through exercise" (even a shot
of glucose can usually help). And if they believe that individuals can
dramatically improve the quality of their lives, Pinker thinks that the
human race has already done so. Although evolution has implanted in us
the "demons" of revenge, sadism and evil as well as the "angels" of
reason, self-control and empathy, the angels have been firmly in the
ascendant since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since
the collapse of the Soviet Union - and he has the statistics to prove
it.
It is perhaps inevitable that a big book on human nature also
ends up as a kind of self-portrait, and it is not difficult to discern
major differences between the authors' temperaments, values and
politics.
Baumeister is a conservative in outlook, who hopes to
"combine the best of modern social science with some of the practical
wisdom of the Victorians". The secret of child-rearing is apparently:
"Forget about self-esteem. Work on self-control."
Trivers is a
born member of the awkward squad who feels that a book on deceit is as
good a place as any to lash out at Nazis, Israelis and US foreign
policy. With the Soviet Union no longer around to "provide a
counterweight to rapacious capitalism", the post-Cold War era has "seen
intense American wars, an accelerated shift of wealth to the already
wealthy...and gross thievery by the wealthy and their agents leading to
near economic collapse". Pinker, meanwhile, sees the same period, with
its decline in violence, as one of unprecedented good fortune.
Several
of these authors offer theories about why serious scholars often
disagree so fundamentally (or, more cynically, why their opponents keep
getting things wrong).
Kahneman suggests that "a weakness of the
scholarly mind" is "theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a
theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily
difficult to notice its flaws". Successful scientists require "the
ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing", which
can blind them to alternative perspectives. Disciplinary divisions
impose further blinkers, so that economists and psychologists often seem
"to be studying different species".
Trivers is far more
outspoken. As he has got older, he explains, he has begun to "care less
about appearing the fool, so I am willing to live with a higher ratio of
foolish thought to true insight in my statements". He seems equally
unconcerned about who he might offend, dismissing whole disciplines in a
couple of sentences.
Pinker also thinks he knows why many people
find it hard to believe his positive narrative. In much of the world, he
points out, "customs such as slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel,
disembowelling, bearbaiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning,
witch-drowning, thief-hanging, public executions, the display of rotting
corpses on gibbets" and so on have "passed from unexceptionable to
controversial to immoral to unthinkable to not-thought-about" during
what he calls the post-Enlightenment "Humanitarian Revolution". The good
news is that most of us are unlikely to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
But it can be hard for people to believe that humans have made any
progress when they watch atrocities every night on the television and
the horrors of the past are largely forgotten.
The social
sciences, Trivers tells us, would benefit from "an explicit, well-tested
(biological) theory of self-interest" - which is why we find only "a
few honest historians". Economics is not a true science, although it
"acts like a science and quacks like one", since its vague notion of
"utility" is not rooted in biology. Most psychology consists of
"competing guesses about what [is] important in human development, none
with any foundation".
But more interesting than this disciplinary
one-upmanship is the general point that Trivers makes about human
arguments. They "feel so effortless because by the time the arguing
starts, the work has already been done. The argument may appear to burst
forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along,
two whole landscapes of information lie already organised, waiting only
for the lightning of anger to reveal them."
Reading all these
books gives one the exhilarating and disorienting sense of visiting five
different intellectual landscapes. All are fascinating, although
everyone will find some more familiar and congenial than others. But
where do they give an accurate picture of the world and where are they
distorted by disciplinary tunnel vision or by their authors' prejudices?
Perhaps
someone will eventually produce an even bigger book, offering an aerial
view of all the separate mountain plains. Until then, we might as well
enjoy the scenery.
Read the whole article.
