Posted by:
G. Salviati
(
)
Date: April 01, 2021 03:39PM
Human: “God bless those willing to speak the truth, about our families, churches, professions, countries, etc.”
When I first read this post, it occurred to me that you might have read the Trivers quote you cite; particularly “that the Zionist conquerors of Palestine committed ethnic cleansing against some 700,000 Palestinians,” and just fell in love with the confirmation of your anti-Israeli, pro Palestinian narrative. After all, love is indeed blind!
But, I suspect, if you knew anything about Trivers (or about the complexities of real, non-trivialized, history) you presumably would have resisted aligning yourself with Trivers. I base this assumption on what Trivers stands for as a socio-biologist and evolutionary psychologist in the materialist science tradition; and in light of your prior posts where a worldview involving genuine altruism and free will is espoused and celebrated; both of which Trivers denies. Perhaps you have now quite literally “sold your soul” to the “devil” in exchange for your favorite historical narrative. In any event, let me try to restore some rationality to your thinking.
Let’s start with a quote from Stephen Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: (Pinker cites Trivers in detail, and they are from the same evolutionary psychology mold. (If they believed in such things as souls, they would indeed by “soul-mates,” along with their favorite son, Richard Dawkins)
“Robert Trivers [like Chomsky], was a left-wing radical as well, and one of the rare *white* Black Panthers. . . . Trivers viewed sociobiology as a subservice discipline. A sensitivity to conflicts of interest can illuminate the interests of repressed agents, such as women and younger generations, and it can expose the deception and self-deception that elites use to justify their dominance. In that way sociobiology follows in the liberal tradition of Locke by using science and reason to debunk the rationalizations of rulers. Reason was used by Locke's time to question the divine right of kings, and may be used in our time to question the pretension that current political arrangements serve everyone's interests.” {Pinker 2002:301}
Now, as you know, I am an unabashed political “lefty” myself. As such, I have no problem with “illuminating the interests of repressed agents . . . and exposing the deception and self-deception that elites use to justify their dominance.” The problem with Trivers, and his ilk, is as follows: (1) the pseudo-scientific program of using sociobiology and evolutionary biology as 'scientific' support for their left-wing agenda; (2) the undermining of human values, which logically follows from a commitment to evolutionary psychology; and (3) the distortion of history by cherry-picking historical “facts” taken out of their social context in order to support his left-wing outrage. (As you have done in your citing of Trivers here.)
In essence, Tivers uses principles of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to come up with a simplistic, naturalized, explanation of human behavior. For him, human behavior is based upon the deterministic genetic principles as outlined in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. (Triver’s wrote the Preface to this book) Through these questionable evolutionary principles, Trivers (and others) believed that they can identify the general biological and psychological source of all that is wrong with human psychology, and the right-wing social institutions that it generates; and thereby defeat any overriding “moral” arguments that might otherwise be offered in support such policies. The upshot of this project was to deny genuine altruism through free acts of will, by placing such things within scientific deterministic mechanisms, both evolutionary and neurological. Fortunately, this program doesn’t work scientifically, simply because (1) human behavior is far too complex to lend itself to such simplistic mechanisms; (2) the cognitive capacities of human beings—including consciousness, human thought, and creativity—far exceed what can be explained by the rote physical mechanisms that underlie neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Anyway, I have harangued on this many times on RfM, and found you for the most part 'on board' with these observations.
Trivers’ negative review of Sober and Wilson’s book, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, and the follow-up debate, is helpful in understanding Trivers’ attitude. In this book, Sober and Wilson distinguish between “biological altruism” and “psychological altruism” and invoke “group selection” as a partial explanation of genuine psychological altruism. By so doing, unlike the social psychologists, they take the folk psychology of beliefs, desires, motivations, etc. seriously. Here are some of Trivers’ objections to this position:
“You know you are slow train to nowhere when, in a book promising to treat the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior, we have to stop and consider whether *introspection* may provide an adequate evidentiary basis for firm conclusions on human behavior? If the answer to that is “yes,” I want off this train. As it is, I wish I were reading a different book on the train.”
In other words, Trivers wants no part in any explanation of human behavior that involves conscious reflection about desires; motivations; or genuine emotional caring in the context of free choices. Altruism is a rote biological (genetic) mechanism and nothing more. Thus,
“The effort to put together a coherent theory of psychology using terms such as desires, thoughts and beliefs seems to me doomed at the outset.”
The negativism of such a position as it relates to human values is relished by Trivers:
“Unto Others brought to mind two visits to my office when I was a young professor at Harvard in the 1970s. The first was from a freshman in my “Social Evolution” class. He said that he was disturbed by the implications of natural selection applied to human behavior. I seemed to be arguing, he said, that there were only two kinds of altruism in nature, kin-directed and return-benefit, chiefly reciprocal altruism. He asked if I thought there was any other kind of altruism out there. I said I did, and his face brightened and he asked me what its meaning was and I said it was being selected out. [In other words the kind that doesn’t actually exist because it is not evolutionally helpful.] His face fell and, as he stood up to leave, he said he could not go on living believing the things I believed. I smiled broadly and assured him that it created no problems for me at all.”
https://metanexus.net/review-elliott-sober-and-david-sloan-wilsons-unto-others/This last quote shows the damage that so-called “liberal education” can do in unsuspecting young minds: By all means, let’s be sure that our college freshmen do not subscribe to such ridiculous notions as genuine altruism and free will. [One might ask Trivers how individual human behavior can be altered for the "good" if in fact there can be no real reflection and genuine free will from which to evaluate bad institutional ideas, and act to change them.