Evolution, Stress & the Limits of Individualism

Some underlying problems in Chris Draper's theory

Through Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravin, shrieked against his creed...

Are God and Nature then at strife

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, LV-LV1

IN the Financial Times, sometime last year, Harry Eyres in his 'Slow Lane' column made a comparison between Castro's Cuba (see my review earlier this month on this Blog of Chris Draper's article in Anarchist Voices entitled 'Surviving Political Hypocrisy in Hard Times') and our own UK version of neo-liberalism; Mr. Eyres writes:
'If Castro's Cuba has been an exercise in stress-reduction, then the extreme versions of neo-liberalism unleashed over the western world, starting in the US and Britain in the early 1980s, could be seen as experiments in the maximisation of stress, both on people and the environment.'

Mr. Eyres explains further:
'Neo-liberals believe, in theory at least, in an unfettered market, with the minimum of regulation and of protections for workers and the environment, both viewed as resources to be exploited.'

Which system is best and which will survive?

Charles Darwin & the 'Escalator Fallacy'

The neo-liberals can, and often do, invoke evolution on their side, and the sociobiologist M.T. Ghiselin in 'The Economy of Nature & the Evolution of Sex' (1974) writes:
'The evolution of society fits the Darwin paradigm in its most individualistic form. The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end. Understand that economy, and how it works, and the underlying reasons for social phenomena are manifest. They are the means by which one organism gains some advantage to the detriment of another.'

In fact, it seems that Darwin distrusted the idea of 'evolution' as an 'escalator' with life proceeding steadily upwards from lifeless matter through plants and animals to man: this he regarded as vacuous and avoided the term; conversely the concept was promoted by Herbert Spencer (quoted approvingly by Chris Draper in an essay on this NV Blog), who first coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', that was given currency by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck at the beginning of the 19th century. Of Lamarck, Mary Midgley writes of what she describes as a 'Panglossian distortion' or 'Escalator Fallacy', in which she argues:  'It is the idea that evolution is a steady, linear upward movement, a single inexorable process of improvement, leading (as a disciple of Herbert Spencer's put it) "from gas to genius" and beyond into some superhuman spiritual stratosphere.'  Midgley claims Darwin was not convinced by this or what she calls a 'cosmic insurance policy to bail out the human race'.

And yet, this crude view has now been transformed into the 'Social Darwinist' idea, put forward by people like Ghiselin, that life has been scientifically proved to be essentially competitive, and in some respects exposing social feelings, altruism and mutual aid as more or less humbug and illusion. As a philosopher, Mary Midgley (see 'Evolution as a Religion' [1985]) claims this view of Ghiselin has often been shown to be nonsense:
'since many very successful species of social animals, including our own, have evolved these traits, have survived by them and continue to live by them their unreality cannot be the message of evolutionary theory.'  Yet, Ms. Midgley writes: 'because of of its strongly dramatic force, as well as its various political uses, this notion (survival of the fittest) persists through repeated attempts to correct it...'  Darwin saw no reason to put forward a law guaranteeing the continuation of any changes he noted, but Spencer hatched a bold picture of an 'evolution escalator' that has prevailed over Darwin's more complicated concept.  In the 19th century Spencer, with only a sparse acquaintance with biology, promoted the notion of the 'survival of the fittest' as a social ideal having the result in the United States of outselling every philosopher in his day.  Yet, it is not just Joe Public that is hooked on Spencer's oversimplified evolutionary escalator but also, Mary Midgley argues, it is often popular among scientists who ought to know its limitations.

Millionaires & Hitler's Table-Talk

Out of Spencer's seductive melodramatic concept of evolution in the United States and Europe came its political populisers, and Ms. Midgley quotes from one of Spencer's American disciples: 
'The millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done... It is because they are thus selected that wealth - both their own and that entrusted to them - aggregates under their hands... They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get higher wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.' (William Sumner, The Challenge of Facts [1887])

Then Mary Midgley gives us a European example from Hitler's Table-Talk:
'If we did not respect the law of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when wild animals would again devour us - then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist except microbes... By means of the struggle the elites are continually renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.' (Hugh Trevor Roper [ed] Hitler's Table-Talk [1963])

Mary Midgley insists that Darwin resisted this kind of thing, and in his The Descent of Man tried to show the difference between 'the kind of qualities which make it possible for a social group to survive over many generations, and those that might keep a single individual afloat for his lifetime.'

Cookbook Ideas Are No Answer!

Of Cuba, Harry Eyres in the FT writes:
'The political and economic regime of Fidel and now Raúl Castro's Cuba might have its severe limitations and its longueurs (not least the leader's own speeches, broadcast at interminable length on state television and quoted in the turgid official newspaper Granma) but it was designed to minimise certain kinds of stress, at least for those who were not vocal critics of the revolution.'

Of course we should be careful what we wish for here, as this kind stress reduction can equally apply to other dictatorships such as that of General Franco's Spain in the 1960s: in 1964, I was in the mountain town of Ronda just as the Franco régime was celebrating '25 años de Paz' ('25-years of Peace').  It is too early to say which political model, the Castro's Cuban/ Franco's 'stress reduction model' or the hectic US/ UK 'neo-liberal model', will triumph in the years to come but Mr. Draper, in so far as his article in Anarchist Voices represents a challenge to cookbook politics and stale thinking of the British left, is justified in making us aware of the dilemmas that confront us.  

Calamity Kate Caught With Her Tits Hanging Out!

A Free Press:  Are there limits to the Enlightenment?

IS IT a cruel irony that those who live by celebrity die by celebrity?  In an age in which Simon Cowell and the 'X-Factor' has replaced Hughie Green and the more homely 'Opportunity Knocks', are we now in an era in which Bread and Circuses rage, and one in which we snigger and sneer at inept contestants lured onto TV, we might well ask if the spirit of the Enlightenment has now overstepped the mark?  Each day the weight of evidence seems to grow:  with Kate Middleton caught on camera with her tits hanging out, Prince Harry photographed philandering with good-time girls while playing strip-poker in a Los Angeles hotel room, and now riots around the world following a feeble You-Tube film desecrating the good name of the prophet Mohammed.  Have we in the West, now indulged in too much freedom of choice in our consumer society?

As a poet said in the middle of the last Century:  'Property, property, let us expand soul and body without end!'

This is a serious problem for western intellectuals, not least those of us around the Northern Voices publication and NV Blog where we too are under criticism from a small local sect or at the anarchist paper Freedom in London, where they have been under attack from David Hoffman, the Copyright Kid, a freelance journalist who seems intent on suing almost everything that moves, and has been labeled 'writ-happy'.  The philosopher, Mary Midgley, has written (see her 'Evolution as a Religion' in 1985):  'Internalized in each of us is a voice which speaks with accents of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Mill, Hulme, Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft:  a voice which says, "Was it for this that we defied the priests, the fathers, and the Kings?  Can anything be more important than individual liberty?".' 

The thing is that since the Renaissance, it may even have begun with the Greeks, it has broadly been the aim of western civilisation to free up individuals from the chains of their social backgrounds so as to help people to escape and stand on their own feet, free from family, the state, the Church etc.  Even western Christianity, with its focus on the separate, irreplaceable value of each human soul, helped to play a role in this flowering of the enlightenment.  In a way, this spirit of the Enlightenment has been the engine of all that is good and wonderful in western society today, and it is in the blending of liberalism and socialism that is present in the writings of such anarchist thinkers as Rudolf Rocker and more recently Noam Chomsky, the linguist, who openly describes himself as a 'Child of the Enlightenment'.

For my part, I confess that lately I have been regularly taking Mary Midgley to bed with me, and she persuasively writes:  'The careful separating out of each soul from its social background has of course been responsible for an immense amount that is distinctive and valuable in the achievements of our civilization.'  It has never been carried so far by any other culture,  and Mary adds that it is 'No wonder that to many people it never looked, until lately, as if we could have too much of that good thing, individualism.'

As I write this I have before me a copy of last Saturday's International Herald Tribune, with a headline story entitled 'A Parisian avenue far from romantic', in which the writer recalls that the French Culture Minister and novelist, Andre Malraux, in the 1960s told a journalist 'that the Champs-Élysées - then considered the most beautiful avenue in the world - had "an American basement".'  Today, we learn from the writer, Steven Erlanger, that America is no longer confined to the basement, 'but American business and its brands are prominently above ground on a Champs-Élysées that has become increasingly commercialized and globalized.'

What Mary Midgley said in 1985, was that while there were still tyrants, 'what [in 1985] chiefly confronts us ... is not an Easter Island row of ossified traditional patriarchs, but a chaotic mob of dollar-snatching cormorants, doing damage of an order undreamed of in previous ages.'  Indeed, there are many 'dollar-snatching cormorants' today, as the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) was quick to point out this week, after the snaps of her were published, but there are also many genuine tyrants and enemies of freedom, not just on the right but also on the left.

I want to agree with Mary Midgley in everything she says about 'dollar snatching cormorants' and because she challenges the pretensions of some modern scientists like Richard Dawkins, but here Ms. Midgley is writing in 1985, at a time of the softening in the Cold War when Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov had just arrived in the Kremlin and before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more importantly before the rise of Islam as an international political force, before the Salman Rushdie case and the burning of his book 'Satanic Verses' by Pakistanis in Bradford, before 9/ 11 and before 7/ 7 and other dramatic features of the post-post-modern era.  As I write this, I am listening to Andrew Marr interviewing Salman Rushdie on Radio 4's 'Start the Week', and Mr. Rushdie says that when we 'self-censor' to please a publisher or even a public 'a little part of us dies' inside.

Like Chomsky, we in the West are all 'Children of the Enlightenment', and this is a project that began even earlier than the Renaissance with the Ancient Greeks.  And yet, some of us are bastard children of the Enlightenment:  witness Adolf Hitler, of whom George Orwell wrote, that in the 1930s Germany represented a version of modern science in the service of ideas rooted in the Stone Age.   What protects us against this outcome, I would argue, is the presence of something that can be represented as a free media with all its faults and blemishes:  the likes of Julian Assange, and Wikileaks and even an old tin-pot anarchist publication like Freedom Press in Whitechapel.  If this means we have to put up with the Irish Star, Berlusconi  in Italy and 'Closer' in France so be it.  I don't want to appear pompous, but so long as I am an editor at Northern Voices, I will be anxious to oppose self-censorship and to stick to the Enlightenment project..