Re: [Marxism] Bonds, Genes, Racism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sayan Bhattacharyya wrote:
> But in the academy, that is not what sociobiology refers to today.
> Sociobiology is mainly associated with the work of the biologist E.O.
> Wilson, who teaches at Harvard. No one refers to "The Bell Curve"
> authors as sociobiologists.

So what.

As I have told you, sociobiology is an explanation of society that runs 
counter to Marxism. Let me repeat that for emphasis.

SOCIOBIOLOGY IS AN EXPLANATION OF SOCIETY THAT RUNS COUNTER TO MARXISM

When you keep insisting that it is a legitimate discipline, I really 
have to question what your commitment to Marxism is. There have been 
some excellent critiques of sociobiology in books and journals by 
Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose, but they are not online. This was 
written by Steven Rosenthal, a radical sociologist:

http://tomweston.net/rosent.htm

How Science is Perverted to Build Fascism:
A Marxist Critique of E.O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

by:  Steve Rosenthal Department of Sociology, Hampton University, 
Hampton VA, presented at 1998 at the Southern Sociological Society meeting

For twenty-five years Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has put forward 
the idea that it is human nature to be fascist. In his latest book 
Consilience (an archaic word that means combining), Wilson insists that 
sociobiology must be imposed on all academic disciplines.

E.O. Wilson is a Harvard professor emeritus of entomology, the study of 
insects. In the 1970s he updated the old social Darwinist ideology that 
human societies are shaped by the biological nature of humans. Just as 
the nature of ants creates colonies of queens, drones, workers, and 
slaves, the nature of humans creates racism, sexism, patriotism, wars, 
religion, and class exploitation. Wilson used this "revelation" to argue 
that efforts to fight against racism, sexism, and imperialism go against 
human nature and are thus exceedingly difficult, and to claim that 
communism is unscientific and cannot work. Wilson proudly says of 
himself, "At my core, I am a social conservative, a loyalist. I cherish 
traditional institutions, the more venerable and ritual-laden the better."

Wilson put these arguments into Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 
published in 1975 by Harvard University Press and widely promoted by the 
popular media. Many natural and social scientists exposed human 
sociobiology as an unscientific attempt to defend the capitalist status 
quo as natural and unchangeable.

Because of these sharp critiques, Wilson reinvented himself as an 
environmentalist concerned about bio-diversity. A quarter century and 
five books later, Wilson today poses as a reasonable advocate of genetic 
and cultural "co-evolution" and as a proponent of genetic/environmental 
interaction. He pretends to reject biological determinism, social 
Darwinism, and eugenics. The ruling class has extolled Consilience as 
the crowning achievement of a visionary elder statesman of capitalist 
science. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal lavishly praised 
his call for the subjugation of the social sciences and the humanities 
to the natural sciences, and for the elevation of his pseudo-science to 
state religion. The Atlantic Monthly interviewed Wilson and published 
excerpts of Consilience.

The unifying concept of Consilience is human nature. According to 
Wilson, human nature "is the_hereditary regularities of mental 
development that bias cultural evolution in one direction_and thus 
connect the genes to culture" (p. 164). Therefore, in all human 
societies we favor our own family, ethnic and religious group, impose 
male dominance, create hierarchies of status, rank, and wealth and rules 
for inheritance, promote the territorial expansion and defense of our 
society, and enter into contractual agreements (pp. 168-172). Recycling 
the main ideological assertions of Sociobiology, Wilson claims that 
racism, religious hatred, sexism, and war are not inevitable features of 
capitalism, but universal traits of our genetically evolved human nature.

The natural sciences, Wilson claims, have discovered these truths, and 
the social sciences and the humanities must adopt them in order to 
achieve "consilience." Cognitive neuroscience, human behavioral 
genetics, evolutionary biology, and the environmental sciences are the 
four "bridges of consilience" from the natural sciences to the social 
sciences and humanities. Only "consilience" can rescue social scientists 
and humanists from "the pits of Marxism" and postmodernist relativism.

To illustrate "consilience," Wilson interprets the 1994 genocide in 
Rwanda. He writes that it was partly an example of "ethnic rivalry run 
amuck," reflecting our genetically based tribal instincts. It also had a 
"deeper cause, rooted in environment and demography."

Population growth outstripped the carrying capacity of the land. "The 
teenage soldiers of the Hutu and Tutsi then set out to solve the 
population problem in the most direct possible way." And, Wilson 
concludes, "Rwanda is a microcosm of the world" (pp. 287-88).

Consider what Wilson omits from his analysis. Hutus and Tutsis 
intermarried centuries ago, and there is no biological distinction 
between them. European colonialists arbitrarily created an ethnic 
distinction and used the Tutsi minority to impose indirect rule on the 
Hutu majority. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank 
imposed agricultural and financial reforms that shifted land use from 
subsistence food production to export crops such as coffee.

Environmental scientists and demographers (specialists on population) 
have shown that famines and wars in Africa are the result of 
imperialism, not overpopulation. France, Egypt, South Africa, Russia, 
and other imperialists armed rival factions in Rwanda. Nationalist 
leaders in Rwanda recruited, incited, and armed the "teenage soldiers." 
Pres. Clinton prevented the US Government and the UN from intervening to 
halt the genocide. Wilson blames genocide on human nature and 
overpopulation to let imperialists and local nationalists off the hook. 
Under the banner of "consilience" Wilson excludes from his analysis 
knowledge provided by history, anthropology, economics, political 
science, sociology, demography, and environmental science.

Wilson similarly perverts the humanities. Consider his analysis of 
ethics. Ethical behavior for Wilson is patriotic behavior.   Therefore, 
religion is "a necessary device of survival," because it promotes 
submission to the group. Religion "is also empowered mightily by its 
principal ally, tribalism." Moreover, humans by nature are easily 
indoctrinated and manipulated (pp. 245-260). The human brain, Wilson 
asserts, "is a stone-age organ." It makes people "intuitive and 
dogmatic," emotional and unscientific. These "preliterate traits are 
commonplace in citizens of modern industrial societies" (p. 208). 
Revealing a despicable elitist contempt for most of humanity, Wilson 
laments that human nature creates genocidal Nazis, who are easily 
indoctrinated with religious and nationalistic ideologies to become mass 
murderers, yet he urges us "to discipline the old ways of thought but 
never to abandon them" (p. 208).

Wilson also applied his sociobiological ideological framework to the 
US/NATO war in Yugoslavia. Speaking to a large audience at Emory 
University Medical School last spring (personal communication from a 
faculty member who was present) while the war in Yugoslavia was going 
on, Wilson explained ethnic cleansing as an expression of natural human 
religious dogmatism and tribalism, thereby justifying Western military 
intervention as a humanitarian effort. Wilson did not mention that 
United States and Western European leaders ruined the economy of 
Yugoslavia by the imposition of free market structural adjustment 
programs and promoted the breakup and division of Yugoslavia into small 
dependent neo-colonial states. Wilson did not explain that the US/NATO 
alliance wanted to assert strategic domination of the Balkans in order 
to remove the region from Russian influence and safeguard future oil 
pipelines to be built from the Caspian region into Western Europe. 
Wilson did not explain that Balkan rulers are fascist demagogues who 
diverted the anger of workers by making scapegoats of members of other 
Balkan nationalities and religions. Wilson ignored the multiethnic unity 
that was achieved by the Yugoslav partisans against fascism during World 
War II, because for him such multiethnic unity is a genetically 
impossibility.

If we recognize Wilson's approach to human nature as an atrocious 
example of reification, how should we as sociologists analyze human 
nature? Humans create our nature through our history, our labor, and 
through our interaction with each other and with our environment. 
Although our brain is a product of evolution, there is no such thing as 
a fixed human nature. Before the invention of agriculture, our human 
ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years in small communal 
societies that had no state, private wealth, or contracts.

There is no genetic basis for tribalism, racism, sexism, or other 
features of present societies. These ideologies and behaviors in the 
world today reflect the class interests of capitalist rulers, and 
millions of workers throughout the world have fought against them.

We can develop a scientific outlook toward human nature, only if we have 
no ideological need to justify or perpetuate any aspect of class 
exploitation and social inequality.

What is a Marxist approach to ethics? Wilson's sociobiological approach 
to ethics evades the concrete reality of workers' subordination to 
capitalist rule by focusing on the relationship between the individual 
and society. Marxist ethics recognizes that what is good for the 
exploiting class is bad for the working class. Egalitarianism and 
internationalism are the ethical precepts of the working class. 
Patriotism, religion, racism, and sexism benefit the exploiting class. 
They enrich capitalists, blur class lines, and promote divisions within 
the working class. That is why Wilson wants to "discipline but never 
abandon" them.

How should we view the "unification of knowledge?" We should oppose 
"consilience" not to defend academic disciplines developed historically 
under capitalism, or to defend the postmodernist view that everything is 
relative. We should oppose Wilson's "consilience," because it is an 
attempt to unify the academic world under a fascist pseudo-science. 
Marxists strive to unify and expand our understanding of the world. In 
contrast to Wilson's reductionist, mechanical materialist approach to 
science, dialectical materialism is the Marxist scientific method based 
on the reality that everything in the world is interconnected and in the 
process of changing.

In universities today capitalist control over science has been tightened 
up. Biotech, pharmaceutical, and military interests control public and 
private research funding, and pressures to obtain grants preoccupy most 
scientists. In the social sciences and the humanities, however, there 
are more minority and women faculty and students, and there is more 
critical and Marxist oriented thinking about society.

Wilson wants to use "consilience" to whip the rest of the academic world 
into line for the ruling class. His sharpest ideological attacks are 
directed at Marxists.

Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, writing about the rise of 
fascism in Italy during the 1920s, called those who played a major role 
in helping the ruling class build ideological support for fascism 
"organic intellectuals." E.O. Wilson is an organic intellectual, a 
"loyalist" who has dedicated his career to assisting the growth of 
fascism in the United States. Marxists led the anti-fascist struggle to 
defeat the engenics movement that was the "crown jewel" of fascist 
pseudo-science during the first half of this century. Today we must 
organize to defeat Wilson's attempts to make "sociobiological 
consilience" the academic centerpiece of a new period of fascism.

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