[extropy-chat] Somewhat pessimistic view of teaching EP

[Lee Corbin]

Keith wondered where one might disagree with


> http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=xm3c4mgmb8b6fhkn54zhzwxfcgbzpjdl
> 
> The Social Responsibility in Teaching Sociobiology
> By DAVID P. BARASH

Here is where it bothered me:

> At first glance, none of this [sociobiology, EP] this especially threatening.
> Moreover it has been liberating [sic] in the extreme, shedding new light
> on a wide range of animal and human social behavior. But at the same time,
> the individual- and gene-centered view of life offers, in a sense, a perspective
> that is profoundly selfish; hence Richard Dawkins's immensely influential book,
> The Selfish Gene. The basic idea has been so productive that it has rapidly 
> become dogma: Living things compete with each other (more precisely, their 
> constituent genes struggle with alternative copies) in a never-ending 
> process of differential reproduction, using their bodies as vehicles, or 
> tools, for achieving success. The result has been to validate a view of 
> human motivations that seems to approve of personal selfishness while 
> casting doubt on any self-abnegating actions, seeing a self-serving 
> component behind any act, no matter how altruistic it might appear. 
> Sociobiologists have thus become modern-day descendants of the
> cynical King Gama, from Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida, who
> proudly announces his cynicism: "A charitable action I can skillfully
> dissect; And interested motives I'm delighted to detect."

Of course, provided one refrains from making the naturalistic fallacy
and confusing "is" with "ought", then there is no problem. (The author
probably realizes this.)

I just can't resist requoting this marvelous Hume quote:

> It might ease the blow by noting that such a vision of human nature is 
> hardly unique to modern evolutionary science. Thus, in An Enquiry 
> Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume wrote that "should a 
> traveller, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly 
> different from any with whom we were ever acquainted ... who were entirely 
> divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who knew no pleasure but 
> friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from 
> these circumstances, detect the falsehood, and prove him a liar, with the 
> same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs 
> and dragons, miracles and prodigies."
>
> Why are people generally so unkind to those who criticize the
> human species as being, at heart, unkind? Maybe because of 
> worry that such critics might be seeking to justify their own 
> unpleasantness by pointing to a general unpleasantness on the part of 
> others. And maybe also because most people like to think of themselves as 
> benevolent and altruistic, or at least, to think that other people think of 
> them that way. It seems likely that a cynic is harder to bamboozle.

No, that's not it at all!  It makes us justly and rightly uncomfortable
for it to be said how innately wicked people are, because some
people will blur the is/ought distinction.  It makes the work harder
for the moralizing conservatives---who already believe people are
wicked---because in their view too many liberals or freethinkers
who resist their preaching will now become selfish.  (And they're
right!  Notice how some, e.g. Ayn Rand, glorified selfishness to the
point that it weakens the bonds of social cohesion.)

But even more than conservatives, who---at least the religious ones---
freely admitted Mankind's Wickedness, it bothered and upset liberals
and freethinkers to no end, especially during the 1980s and 1990s.
Stephen Jay Gould and many others denounced Sociobiology so
vociferously that the entire field had to be renamed!

> In Civilization and Its Discontents, perhaps his most pessimistic book, 
> Freud went on to lament that one of education's sins is that "it does not 
> prepare [children] for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to 
> become the objects. In sending the young into life with such a false 
> psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to 
> equip people starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps 
> of the Italian Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse is 
> being made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not do 
> so much harm if education were to say: 'This is how men ought to be, in 
> order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their 
> not being like that.' Instead of this the young are made to believe that 
> everyone else fulfills those ethical demands - that is, that everyone else 
> is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young, too, 
> shall become virtuous."

The author seems to be agreeing with that horrible and awful fool
Sigmund Freud.  Damitol, but if you tell children that everyone is
evil, just how you expect them to behave?  Christ!

<big snip>

> Bertrand Russell pointed out that "by the cultivation of  large and
> generous desires ... men can be brought to act more than they do 
> at present in a manner that is consistent with the general happiness of 
> mankind." Society is therefore left with the responsibility to do a lot of 
> cultivating.

That's right!  The author sees the light.

> Seen this way, a biologically appropriate wisdom begins to emerge from the 
> various commandments and moral injunctions, nearly all of which can at 
> least be interpreted as trying to get people to behave "better," that is, 
> to develop and then act upon large and generous desires, to strive to be 
> more amiable, more altruistic, less competitive, and less selfish than they 
> might otherwise be.

Yes.

> Enter sociobiology. With its increasingly clear demonstration that Hume, 
> Freud, Brecht, and Nietzsche (also Machiavelli and Hobbes) are basically 
> onto something,

Any old-fashioned preacher could have told you that, and they did

> and that selfishness resides in our very genes, it would 
> seem not only that evolution is a dispiriting guide to human behavior, but 
> also that the teaching of sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology) should 
> be undertaken only with great caution. The renowned primatologist Sarah 
> Hrdy accordingly questioned "whether sociobiology should be taught at the 
> high-school level ... because it can be very threatening to students still 
> in the process of shaping their own priorities," adding: "The whole message 
> of sociobiology is oriented toward the success of the individual. ... 
> Unless a student has a moral framework already in place, we could be 
> producing social monsters by teaching this."
> 
> What to do? One possibility - unacceptable, I would hope, to most educators 
> - would be to refrain altogether from teaching such dangerous truths. 

Oh, leave the poor children alone!  They don't need it drilled into them
how despicable so many people really are and how much violence seems 
to reside in human nature itself.  Nor need they be taught the exactly best
way to fit condoms onto penises, nor how to safely inject drugs (yes, yes, 
they'll use drugs anyway and have sex anyway etc., etc., yawn), or
how to safely hit only the people you are shooting at during your
gang skirmishes.  Let's leave gun safely, sex education, optimal meth
dosages, and so on to their peers and parents.

> Teacher, leave them kids alone! Preferable, I submit, is to structure the 
> teaching of sociobiology along the lines of sex education: Teach what we 
> know, but do so in age-appropriate stages. Just as we would not bombard 
> kindergartners with the details of condom use, we probably ought not 
> instruct preteens in the finer points of sociobiology, especially since 
> many of those are hidden even to those expected to do the teaching.

When most kids "graduate" high school unable to read at the sixth grade
level, I think there are *more* important things to concentrate on.  But
who can resist putting politics and ideology into the schools?

Keith concludes

> (I have a considerable list of objections to the article.  Can any of you 
> guess where?  HKH)

Probably not at all the same places where I demur!   :-)

Lee