Pandemic notwithstanding, my second book “Evolutionary Politics” will hopefully be published this year. Tackling the topic of sociobiology - in other words, the natural origins of social behaviour - from a leftist perspective seems likely to generate few sympathetic readings. For right-wing and centrist critics of the left, to talk about ‘human nature’ at all is to reveal the hopelessly naive, hopelessly wrong, or hopelessly authoritarian nature of the left. Perhaps as a response to this, to talk of ‘human nature’ on the left is to be seen as a hopeless cynic, an essentiallist or determinist.
Few interactions in which Marx and human nature are on the table can be productive, in my experience, because of the dominant practice in western thought is the categorization of the essential quality of things. How, after all, are we taught what a thing is? We might begin with anecdotal oberservations of an object, and use inductive reasoning to abstract some essential quality which is shared by all the objects of that category we have observed (most chairs have four legs, for example). Much of pre-modern philosophy was constructed this way. Scientific empiricism does not, in general, deviate much from this approach, supplanting imperfect anecdote with rigorous data collection, statistical methods and probabilistic inference. But the core metaphysical practice is the same - to construct an ideal category of thing (‘chairs’) which explains something useful about the members of that category.
What both many self-described Marxists and their critics fail to recognise is that Marx was first and foremost a philosopher - he only became an economist later in life - and that his work is actually embedded in a different kind of thought process. Marx never talks about a fixed ‘human nature’, but rather of ‘Gattungswesen’ or ‘species-being’. What is to be human therefore, is embedded in human life, activity and interaction: “The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity”. Or, as the sixth thesis on Feuerbach puts it, “The essence of man is . . .an ensemble of social relations’”. Like Hegel, Heraclitus and the process philosophers, Marx inverts the standard Western metaphysics. Rather than defining categories of things and studying the relations between those categories, we define the interactions and study things as the product of their interaction. A ‘chair’, in in other words, is anything used by humans for sitting.
This is something that the panpsychics and other big-brain wannabe physicists repeatedly fail to understand about themselves. One of the most common complaints about the Standard Model of physics is that it doesn’t tell us anything about what the fundamental particles ‘are’. We can describe their interactions in great deal, but for western metaphysicians the point particle is a singularity about which we still know knowing. Contemporary physics describes a gloriously complex universe made of overlapping fields and tensions, forces and probabilities criss-crossing physical space like waves on the ocean. Particles are merely objects defined by the interactions of these fields. Philosophically, or scientifically, there is nothing more we could or should want to know about them than that.
Evolutionary sociology for Marxists
I intensely dislike the work of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. I am frequently apalled by by lack of restraint on his utilitiarianism; I disagree with the way that he cloaks himself in the banner of animal rights to claim himself a progressive; and believe the outcome of his views are deeply reactionary. Singer’s 1999 pamplet, “A Darwinian Left” is referenced in my forthcoming book, but it stands as a warning of the wrong way to approach sociobiology. Singer argues for an intrinsic human nature which is fundamentally at odds with most of progressive theory and practice. Like Dawkins, the best Singer can find in nature is kin selection, which he argues explains some parochial forms of altruism towards our friends and family while undermining any universalist liberal pretensions. “Evolutionary Politics”, if nothing else, will offer an extended rebuttal of this line of thinking.
Evolutionary biologists do not think, or write, like Peter Singer. Evolutionary systems are characterised by the three processes of generalised Darwinism: variation, selection and (self-)replication. A population displays variation when every otherwise equivalent agent in that population possesses some property (s) which causes measurably (or ‘phenotypically’) different interactions with the agent’s environment. Every fundamental particle, for example, has identical physical properties and will interact with physical forces in an identical manner. Even molecules as large as proteins have consistent and predictable chemical properties. However, complex polymers (including DNA) can have variable properties while remaining chemically similar enough to treat as a population of interacting agents of a single type .
Selection is any process by which an agent in a population with property (s) receives a second property (u() which we call fitness, as a result of an interaction. Fitness can represent any property or payoff, so long as it’s acted upon by the third process (replication). Fitness can be almost any measurable quantity, defined in any direction: it may represent abstract utility, attractiveness, repulsiveness, warmth, chilliness, income, wealth, poverty, proximity to the colour ‘blue’, or degree of aural distinguishability from the sound of a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. In other words, the variability of the property (s) generates differential fitness (u). Lastly, replication is any process which relates the frequency of agents with the property (s) at time t + 1 to their fitness (u) at time t. While many chemical and nuclear reactions differentially produce output products, only a tiny subset of reactions maintain or increase the population of interacting agents. Auto-catalytic or self-replicating populations that also demonstrate variation constitute the complex system we label ‘life’.
The correct leftist understanding of sociobiology is therefore simple. ‘Human nature’ is simply any social behaviour which is generated from a natural, evolutionary process. Humans, as a species, evolved through natural (and cultural) selection, and therefore our ‘essence’ or species-being is as things adapted through that evolutionary process. As my second book will explain, that means both that the idea of a fixed human nature is untenable - what is adaptive in any given context will depend on the composition of a species’ population and its environment - but also that the potential for both cooperation and competition must be seen as part of what it means to be human. This is because both competitive and cooperative strategies can be evolutionary stable under the conditions of natural selection. Progressives are not, as Steven Pinker likes to claim, ‘blank slatists’. We merely reject the idea that empirical observation of human behaviour, no matter how rigorous, can tell us what it means to be human without an understanding of the complex causes (in Niko Tinbergen’s sense) that led to that behaviour.
The Marxist ‘New Man’
Over the decades following his death, Marx’s adage that human nature was determined by the totality of his [sic] social relations, morphed into the the ideal of the ‘New Soviet Man’, which continues to figure largely in the popular caricature of leftism. Many leftist thinkers, including most notably Gramsci, described convincingly how human social relations were produced by their need to support a society’s mode of economic production, and that the entirety of social relations were configured around the needs of capital. The leftist sociological critique of capitalism is perhaps, its greatest and most enduring intellectual contribution. But the idea that changing the mode of production by giving more control to workers would produce a ‘New Soviet Man’ of superior moral character is a bastardization of that theory. The ‘New Man’ is one consequence of changes in the social base, not the goal in and of itself.
Marxism is not a theory of individual morality. Leftists are not trying to produce better people; and any self-described communist who claims that as their aim is not a leftist. We do not believe that moral actions are a consequence of innate virtue, rather, moral actions are a consequence of moral social structures. The desire to discipline individuals is reactionary and conservative, not progressive. Confusing this distinction leads to Stalinist authoritarianism, and the critique of it from liberals. Human behaviour is a product of social relations and that as those relations change human behaviour will change without state interference. The desire to create of moral individuals is utopianism, and modern leftists should want no part in it.
Yet it is a vast oversimplification to reduce the Marxist contribution to a question of economic determinism. There is more to being human than mode of production - Marx and Engels were deeply, if passingly, also interested in the question of social reproduction. In this way, we can see how leftism and sociobiology are fundamentally compatible, rather than antagonistic, social theories. Social behaviour is in part the product of a species which has been subject to the forces of evolution. And it is also the product of economic relations, which vary from place to place and time to time but which share some transhistorial and transcultural commonalities. These two sets of relations define the broad contours of human nature. The force that bridges the gap between nature and economics is culture, which evolves in its own right and as a superstructure on top of a society’s economic base.
A new way forward
The same perspectice can be applied to any aspect of human behaviour. Thinking in terms of processes, and not categories, we recognise that it would be wrong to define ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in terms of some essential category, or catalogue those traits - good or bad - which we imagine to be possessed by some ethnic groups and not others. Instead, gender can only be understood as a relationship - an interaction which defines genders in terms of relations of oppression and subordination - which we label patriarchy. By the same token, we cannot understand ‘whiteness’ until we realise that it is defined in terms of its relationship with the ‘Other’. Ollie from Philosophy Tube has recently addressed precisely this point.
Similarly, we cannot and should not imagine that ‘rascism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘homophobia’ or ‘transphobia’ are innate, fixed traits. Generally, every member in good standing of a liberal society possesses a mental model of a person who is a ‘rascist’ or ‘sexist’ etc. We construct these categories on the basis of the observation of common traits - often traits that are communicated via the media rather than through direct observation. So a rascist is a person who uses certain taboo words or phrases, for examples, or a sexist is a person who sexually harassess and belittles women, and a homophobe is a person who engages in violence against sexual minorities. But when progressives talk about rascism, misogyny or homophobia we are talking about systems of interaction - no person ‘is’ a rascist, essentially; rather, we note that their behaviour reproduces a pattern of interaction between dominant and subaltern groups that affirms and reproduces those relations. The good news, as with evolutionary sociology and historial materialism, is that none of these traits are fixed and will adapt themselves to changing patterns of social relations, which we can influence through other means.
Finally, we would be remiss if we did not apply the same way of thinking to ourselves. No activist, no politician, ‘is’ a progressive merely by some feature of their essential identity (I’m looking at you Elizabeth Warren, Anthony Albanese etc). Rather, progressive is as progressive does - a left-wing activist or politician challenges, critiques and reforms systems of power. Any politician who does not behave in this way - who through their actons reifies inequality and unjustified hierarchies, is not a progressive, regardless of how they may think of themselves, or be measured in academic journals. In the all-too-common reduction of progressive politics to the collection of essential identity categories - a gay mayor! a black president! a female CEO! - we witness the end of the left as a dynamic historical force.