Tuesday, 20th of July, 2004

Here’s an excellent article on/interview with Dan Dennett from the Guardian: The semantic engineer.
On his own website, the author, Andrew Brown, rather charmingly publishes Dennett’s letter to him in response to the article, correcting a number of errors that appear (in true Grauniad fashion) throughout. Since Brown previously wrote The Darwin Wars, a perhaps less-than-bipartisan look at the disputes between the Gould-Lewontin-Rose and the Dawkins-Dennett camps, it’s nice to note that this is a sympathetic and delightful profile of a fascinating man.

I’ve always thought that Gould, Lewontin et al’s main problem with sociobiology, “neo-Darwinism” and so on was due to their far-leftist politics (and note that we can include Chomsky here, who’s more responsible than anyone else for giving a firm evidential basis for the innateness of certain properties of mind, and yet steadfastly refuses to admit to an evolutionary account for them). Upon recently reading the excellent politics chapter in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate I’m even more convinced. A thorough following-through of the implications of Darwinism seems to challenge the leftist dogma that human nature is infinitely malleable, and admitting that the roots of any behavioural traits can be found in our genes seems intolerably close to the horrors of Nazi eugenics and Social Darwinism for these thinkers…

Relatively recently it’s become clear that Dawkins is firmly on the political left (to the extent of occasionally endorsing some less-palatable stuff, like the boycott of Israeli universities), and Dennett seems to me to be a straightforward liberal of some stripe or other, so I think it’s all the more important that the left takes science of all sorts seriously. Peter Singer’s A Darwinian Left is a great place to start, as is the chapter on politics (and much more) in the Pinker book mentioned above. As a good start to the ideas, you can read Jeremy Stangroom quizzing Pinker in an article linked to in my previous post, and I feel that Dennett’s Freedom Evolves has some helpful pointers in the right direction too.
It’s important that the left and Green movements base themselves in how the world really is rather than utopian idealism about how we wish the world to be. That’s the only way to make progress. A similar note concerning idealism-flying-in-the-face-of-the-facts could be made about free-market libertarians who believe (explicitly or not) in the Invisible Hand that will make everything wonderful if only we take away all those pesky regulations…

In addition, it should be made clear that whilst we have to take the empirical implications of Darwinism seriously (it simply is a fact that we’ve evolved from non-thinking robotic replicators, and our minds are a product of what our brains/bodies do), we are just as obligated to challenge any temptations to draw an ought from that is. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”, but that doesn’t mean that we must follow suit. Indeed, as Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker and others have pointed out, we are entirely (and uniquely, in the world as we know it) capable of transcending our genetic heritage - by using our minds, dammit. So let’s get to it! I leave you with a great quote from Pinker’s The Language Instinct, found in Dennett’s brilliant Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life:

…the human brain works however it works. Wishing for it to work in some way as a shortcut to justifying some ethical principle undermines both the science and the ethics (for what happens to the principle if scientific facts turns out to go the other way?).

And here’s a review of The Blank Slate in The Nation, with a very similar political perspective to mine.

4 Responses to “Dennett in the Guardian”

1. Chris Lawson says:
   July 21st, 2004 at 1:55 am

   Hi, Peter.

   You know, it’s very very rare that I read two blog comments in such short succession that agree 100% with my own views (the other entry was the comments about the left and Gulf War 2.0). As a hardboiled contrarian it makes me feel quite uncomfortable to admit it.

   Your comments at the end of the leftist entry are absolutely spot on. One of the things I’ll be doing in my book (Lord, will it ever be finished!) is heaping as much praise as possible on the Red Cross, which was just about the only NGO in Rwanda to know what the hell it was doing. It’s very easy to be cynical and say “we can’t do anything about the way the world is” but the truth is we can. We just have to be brave and smart and energetic.

2. Peter says:
   July 28th, 2004 at 7:55 pm

   Hi there Chris!

   Lovely to read approving comments from you :) Readers can hop over to Chris’s website and blog via the sidebar, and there’s no doubt I’ll be pushing the novel when it finally appears!!!

3. Ms .45 says:
   July 31st, 2004 at 12:27 am

   I would like to point out that innate qualities are something that works for progressive people. I can think of few things crueller and more short-sighted than insisting that a person with an IQ of 180 and a talent for, say, identifying new planets or creating entirely new systems of being, should stifle these talents and pump out a baby a year for her childbearing life for Der Vaterland. Similarly, a minority person who has innate qualities such as leadership, intelligence, charisma, strategy and so on, if included in culture, may use those qualities productively and constructively. If systematically excluded, they can use them otherwise. On the whole, I don’t really enjoy the idea of having the cure for cancer asking me if I want fries with that (or making off with my TV, stereo, etc).

   However, you know as well as I do that sociobiologists think some stupid shit. For a start, nature isn’t “red in tooth and claw” - it’s just Nature. Humans are horrified by bugs that crawl inside living caterpillars to incubate, but the bugs don’t care and there’s no evidence the caterpillars care either. The concept of “nature red in tooth and claw” is just as irrelevantly romantic as the idea that animals are our friends and we shouldn’t eat them. In addition, sociobiologists seem to have no social life - they think, for instance, that young women get raped more than other types of females because we are young and childbearing, rather than because of the Occam-esque factor that young women are sexually active and will therefore statistically get raped more. There are other sillinesses, and I’m sure you’ve come across them.

4. Peter says:
   August 10th, 2004 at 12:09 am

   Hiya Ms .45 :) Yep I was indeed wishing to point out that innateness ought to work for the left as well as the right! Glad to hear you agree there. And sociobiologists can come up with some rot… but mostly that’s a case of bad communication, or of letting political/social prejudices and simplifications override the science.

   Generally, science implies a lot less about other disciplines and areas of life than people want to infer from it. So my point is that we have to accept what we’re forced to by science, and no more - while keeping our moral and political convictions.