The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (22 page)

That human beings inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and that the construction of society is one of these behaviors, I agree. Whether anything worth the risk is to be gained by calling this propensity “human nature,” I wonder. Anthropologists have excellent justification for avoiding the term
human nature
, for which no agreed definition exists, and which all too easily, even when intended as descriptive, is applied prescriptively.

Wilson states that the traits he lists constitute a “narrow statistical circle that we define as human nature.” Like Tonto, I want to ask, “Who ‘we,’ white man?” The selection of traits is neither complete nor universal, the definitions seem sloppy rather than narrow, and the statistics are left to the imagination. More statistics and completer definitions are to be found in
Sociobiology
, of course; but Wilson’s own statement of what the book says is as accurate and complete as it is succinct, so that I think it fair to address my arguments to it.

Taking it, then, phrase by phrase:

Division of labor between the sexes:

This phrase means only that in all or most known societies men and women do different kinds of work; but since it is very seldom understood in that strict meaning, it is either ingenuous or disingenuous to use it in this context without acknowledging its usual implications. Unless those implications are specifically denied, the phrase “division of labor between the sexes” is understood by most readers in this society to imply specific
kinds
of gender-divided work, and so to imply that
these
are genetically determined: our genes ensure that men hunt, women gather; men fight, women nurse; men go forth, women keep the house; men do art, women do domestic work; men function in the “public sphere,” women in the “private,” and so on.

No anthropologist or person with an anthropological conscience, knowing how differently work is gendered in different societies, could accept these implications. I don’t know what implications, if any, Wilson intended. But as this kind of unstated extension of reductionist statements does real intellectual and social damage, reinforcing prejudices and bolstering bigotries, it behooves a responsible scientist to define his terms more carefully.

As some gendered division of labor exists in every society, I would fully agree with Wilson if he had used a more careful phrasing, such as “some form of gender construction, including gender-specific activities.”

Bonding between parents and children; heightened altruism toward closest kin; suspicion of strangers:

All these behaviors are related, and can be defined as forms of “selfish gene” behavior; I think they have been shown to be as nearly universal among human beings as among other social animals. But in human beings such behavior is uniquely, and universally, expressed in so immense a range of behaviors and social structures, of such immense variety and complexity, that one must ask if this range and complexity,
not
present in any animal behavior, is not as genetically determined as the tendencies themselves.

If my question is legitimate, then Wilson’s statement is unacceptably reductive. To focus on a type of human behavior shared with other animals, but to omit from the field of vision the unique and universal character of such behavior among humans, is to beg the question of how far genetic determination of behavior may extend. Yet that is a question that no sociobiologist can beg.

Tribalism:

I understand tribalism to mean an extension of the behavior just mentioned: social groups are extended beyond immediate blood kin by identifying nonkin as “socially kin” and strangers as nonstrangers, establishing shared membership in constructs such as clan, moiety, language group, race, nation, religion, and so on.

I can’t imagine what the mechanism would be that made this kind of behavior genetically advantageous, but I think it is as universal among human groups as the behaviors based on actual kinship. If universality of a human behavior pattern means that it is genetically determined, then this type of behavior must have a genetic justification. I think it would be a rather hard one to establish, but I’d like to see a sociobiologist try.

Incest avoidance:

Here I’m uncertain about the evolutionary mechanism that enables the selfish gene to recognise a selfish gene that is too closely akin, and so determines a behavior norm. If there are social mechanisms preventing incest among the other primates, I don’t know them. (Driving young males out of the alpha male’s group is male-dominant behavior serving only incidentally and ineffectively as incest prevention; the alpha male does mate with his sisters and daughters, though the young males have to go find somebody else’s.)

I’d like to know whether Wilson knows what the general incidence
of incest among mammals is, and whether he believes that incest is “avoided” among humans any more than it is among apes, cats, wild horses, and so on. Do all human societies ban incest? I don’t know; it was an open question, last I heard. That most human societies have cultural strictures against certain types of incest is true; that many human societies fail as often as not to implement them is also true. I think in this case Wilson has confused a common cultural dictum or desideratum with actual behavior; or else he is saying that our genes program us to
say
we must not do something, but do not prevent us from
doing
it. Now those are some fancy genes.

Dominance orders within groups:

Here I suspect Wilson’s anthropology is influenced by behaviorists’ experiments with chickens and primatologists’ observations of apes more than by anthropologists’ observation of human behavior in groups. Dominance order is very common in human societies, but so are other forms of group relationship, such as maintaining order through consensus; there are whole societies in which dominance is not the primary order, and groups in most societies in which dominance does not function at all, difficult as this may be to believe at Harvard. Wilson’s statement is suspect in emphasising one aspect of behavior while omitting others. Once again, it is reductive. It would be more useful if phrased more neutrally and more accurately: perhaps, “tendency to establish structured or fluid social relationships outside immediate kinship.”

Male dominance overall:

This is indeed the human social norm. I take it that the genetic benefit is that which is supposed to accrue in all species in which the male displays to the female to attract her choice and/or drives away weaker males from his mate or harem, thus ensuring that his genes will dominate in the offspring (the
male
selfish gene). Species in which this kind of behavior does not occur (including so close a genetic relative as the
bonobo) are apparently not considered useful comparisons or paradigms for human behavior.

That male aggressivity and display behavior extend from sexuality to all forms of human social and cultural activity is indubitable. Whether this extension has been an advantage or a liability to our genetic survival is certainly arguable, probably unprovable. It certainly cannot simply be assumed to be of genetic advantage in the long run to the human, or even the male human, gene. The “interaction of heredity with environment” in this case has just begun to be tested, since only in the last hundred years has there been a possibility of
unlimited
dominance by any subset of humanity, along with
unlimited
, uncontrollable aggressivity.

Territorial aggression over limiting
[sic]
resources:

This is evidently a subset of “male dominance overall.” As I understand it, women’s role in territorial aggression has been subsidiary, not institutionalised, and seldom even recognised socially or culturally. So far as I know, all organised and socially or culturally sanctioned aggression over resources or at territorial boundaries is entirely controlled and almost wholly conducted by men.

It is flagrantly false to ascribe such aggression to scarcity of resources. Most wars in the historical period have been fought over quite imaginary, arbitrary boundaries. It is my impression of warlike cultures such as the Sioux or the Yanomamo that male aggression has no economic rationale at all. The phrase should be cut to “territorial aggression,” and attached to the “male dominance” item.

Other forms of ethical behavior:

This one’s the big weasel. What forms of ethical behavior? Ethical according to whose ethics?

Without invoking the dreaded bogey of cultural relativism, I think we have a right to ask anybody who asserts that there are universal human moralities to list and define them. If he asserts that they are
genetically determined, he should be able to specify the genetic mechanism and the evolutionary advantage they involve.

Wilson appends these “other forms” to “incest avoidance,” which is thus syntactically defined as ethical behavior. Incest avoidance certainly involves some genetic advantage. If there are other behaviors that involve genetic advantage and are universally recognised as ethical, I want to know what they are.

Not beating up old ladies might be one. Grandmothers have been proved to play a crucial part in the survival of grandchildren in circumstances of famine and stress. Their genetic interest of course is clear. I doubt, however, that Wilson had grandmothers in mind.

Mother-child bonding might be one of his “other forms of ethical behavior.” It is tendentious, if not hypocritical, to call it “bonding between parents and children” as Wilson does, since it is by no means a universal cultural expectation that the male human parent will, or should, bond with his child. The biological father is replaced in many cultures by the mother’s brother, or serves only as authority figure, or (as in our culture) is excused from responsibility for children he sired with women other than his current wife. A further danger in this context is that the mother-child bond is so often defined as “natural” as to be interpreted as subethical. A mother who does not bond with her child is defined less as immoral than as inhuman. This is an example of why I think the whole matter of ethics, in this context, is a can of actively indefinable worms far better left unopened.

Perhaps that’s why Wilson left these “other ethical behaviors” so vague. Also, if he had specified as ethical such behavior as, say, cooperation and mutual aid between individuals not blood kin, he would have risked his credibility with his fellow biologists still trained to interpret behavior strictly in the mechanistic mode.

Finally, I wonder if genetic determinism as such really is “the bugbear of the social sciences.” Academics are the very model of territorialism, and some social scientists certainly responded with fear and fury to what they saw as Wilson’s aggression when he published
Sociobiology
.
But on the whole, Wilson’s statement seems a little paranoid, or a little boastful.

The controversy and animus aroused by
Sociobiology
might have been avoided if the author had presented his determinism in more precise, more careful, less tendentious, less anthropologically naive terms. If in fact his theory is not a bugbear to the social sciences, it’s because it has not proved itself useful or even relevant to them.

I’d find his arguments far more interesting if he had genuinely taken pains to extend his reductive theory to explain specifically human behavior, including the elaboration of the gender-based, kinbased repertory of behaviors we share with animals into the apparently infinite varieties of human social structures and the endless complexities of culture. But he has not done so.

There are social scientists and humanists, as well as determinists, who would argue that it’s the vast range and complexity of human behavioral options, in origin genetically determined, that gives us what may ultimately be the illusion of free will. But Wilson, having raised this question in
Naturalist
, ducks right under it with a flat statement of belief that “people have free will.” The statement as such is meaningless. I am not interested in his beliefs. He is not a religious thinker or a theologian but a scientist. He should speak as such.

ABOUT FEET

Watching a ballroom dancing competition on television, I was fascinated by the shoes the women wore. They were dancing in strapped stiff shoes with extremely high heels. They danced hard, heel and toe, kicking and prancing, clapping their feet down hard and fast with great precision. The men wore flat-heeled shoes, conformed to the normal posture of the foot. One of them had flashing jewels on the outer side of each shoe. His partner’s shoes were entirely covered with the flashing jewels, which must have made the leather quite rigid, and the heels were so high that her own heels were at least three inches above the balls of her feet, on which all her weight was driven powerfully again and again. Imagining my feet in those shoes, I cringed and winced, like the Little Mermaid walking on her knives.

The question has been asked before but I haven’t yet got an answer that satisfies me: why do women cripple their feet while men don’t?

It’s not a very long step to China, where women broke the bones of their daughters’ feet and strapped the toes under the ball of the foot to create a little aching useless ball of flesh, stinking of pus and exudations trapped in the bindings and folds of skin: the Lotus Foot, which was, we are told, sexually attractive to men, and so increased the marriageability and social value of the woman.

Such attraction is comprehensible to me as a perversity. A gendered perversity. How many women would be attracted by a man’s feet deliberately deformed, dwarfed, and smelling of rot?

So there is the question again. Why? Why do we and why don’t they?

Well, I wonder, did some Chinese women find other women’s Lotus Feet sexually attractive?