‘The Battle’ of culture and genes

The model of human nature one embraces will guide and shape everything else, from the economic system one prefers to the political system one supports.

While I agree with the conclusions Brooks and Wehner reach with respect to liberty and free enterprise, I cannot agree with how they got there. I worry their view of human nature is somewhat anemic.

My quibble is really with a single word: “embrace.” One word is small, but makes a big difference. Embrace is too volitional in the context of their article. It assumes that one tries on a worldview as a pair of shoes at the mall. But sadly, I don’t think matters are this simple. (Even feet come in different sizes.) The new culture war we’re fighting is a kind of gene war, too, which I’ll explain momentarily.

I realize that Brooks has been pounding the pulpit for cultural change. Good for him. Cultural change is good and I’ll continue to fight alongside him in that trench war. But I think Brooks and Wehner overestimate the extent to which one’s worldview is a manuscript he writes upon the soul. They do not say this explicitly, but their reference to an embrace of traditional “models of human nature” strongly suggests it.

So, at the risk of resurrecting the nature/nurture debate, I want to challenge Brooks and Wehner to consider that Big Government types are just as much born as they are made. Because if we do, we may make some strategic adjustments in this “new culture war,” one that takes into account our actual human nature as evolved beings.

Models of Man

One’s ‘model of man’ is not merely an abstraction he accepts — or “picture” — based on some tradition or other in intellectual history — say of Hobbes, Rousseau or Madison. It is also the product of genes forged in the fires of our evolutionary past. And while one may show preference for the Madison’s model of man as “no angel” but capable of good here and there — I sure do — the truth is the world is not really filled with models of men, but men–with all their culture baggage and their various flavors of DNA soup. We are different one to the next. We are different both in the models of men we construct as well as how we come to construct those models. Those differences are the product of nature and nurture operating in a kind of vacillating tandem. And culture is only half of that tandem.

I guess this brings us to is another level of description — our “meta-model” of human nature, if you will. And when it comes to our meta-models of human nature, Brooks and Wehner’s meta-model is perhaps naively Lockean. That is, they seem to believe we are more tabula rasa (clean slate) than we are. My meta-model is more Darwinian.

Stone Age Ethics

Advances in genetics should be enough to stave off most Lockean objections about the “nature” of man. So also can advances in evolutionary psychology. As I discuss elsewhere:

Our ancestors lived in small clans of no more than 150 people. Most clans were smaller. It made little sense for people to hoard. Food would rot without refrigeration, for example. Everyone was better off sharing, or engaging what we might call “slow trade.” Otherwise, everyone pitched in where they could. When they did, they were more likely to survive as as group. Millenia in such conditions left us with evolutionary baggage. Wealth disparity not only became culturally taboo, we evolved affective responses to it. But these inborn cooperative strategies — while successful in Stone Age contexts — don’t scale very well. Nor do they work in modern economies. Sharing among 50 is not analogous to sharing among 350 million. The dynamics are different and so are the results. None of this is to argue that giving or sharing is wrong — particularly when it’s within your family or community. It is, rather, to argue that systems of redistribution are built on instincts forged in the fires of our genetic past. History shows they don’t work well. Guilt, envy and indignation — the Stone Age Trinity — are cave man ethics that should be tempered and kept local.

Of course, tempering evolutionary instincts is easier said that done. There have to be very strong countervailing forces to do so. Arguments for freedom must identify strong sentiments that terminate in people’s concern for the have-nots that evolved in a mostly zero-sum world. Culture and cultural mores count as such contervailing forces. But if your deepest mores are informed first, say, by the “Stone Age Trinity” (or worse, by some authoritarian urge), then any new reference point for what’s right or good has to be pried away from forces working in your DNA. Or we have to learn to work with those forces.

Ironically, the same can be said for freedom lovers. People more disposed to be “traders” rather than “raiders” may also be operating on more than just principles learned whilst reading the Federalist papers or Ayn Rand. We may have trader DNA or some complex inborn structure that makes it more likely that we’re less interested in envy and more interested in enterprise. This reality changes the game a little, because it means that no individual is reducible to a single model of human nature.

Political Tribes

To illustrate my point about taking into account our meta-models of man, consider what one might take to be the unconscious strategy behind Brooks’s book The Battle. The basic idea is that the culture war we’re now fighting is between two basic tribes: the Big Government tribe and the Free Enterprise tribe. That this dichotomy taps so readily into our coalitional instincts only goes to show that there are deep evolutionary forces at work in us. In other words, it’s not merely that we “embrace” one of the two worldviews Brooks sets out, but that we are wired to be coalitional beings. Even people who claim to be moderates or centrists on economic matters long to have a home among others who think like them. I dare say it’s in their nature.

If we’re more conscious of such inclinations, we may be more successful at framing our arguments in ways that appeal to diverse models of human nature, whether informed by upbringing, intellectual traditions or genetic heritage. But until we can become masters at the art and science of cultural change for the love of liberty, we must be content with shoring up checks on political power.

A Note on Madison

So we come full circle with a note on Madison. James Madison liked the idea of freedom and thought it could only be preserved by building institutions that decentralized political power. Given the profound diversity of dispositions and cultural influences to be found in a pluralistic society like America, I can only agree. So however we — Brooks, Wehner and I — arrive at our reverence for the Madisonian perspective, we got there. It is, more or less, the last best hope for humanity.

Max Borders is a writer living in Austin. He blogs at Ideas Matter.