Book Review: "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber & David Wengrow

I finally got around to reading ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’ by the late, great David Graeber and David Wengrow. Graeber was a first-rate anthropologist and leftist thought-leader, and his tragic death during the pandemic was a huge blow to the international left. While Graeber’s ideas were often insightful and revolutionary, his written work was often dry and difficult. While frequently targeting mass-market ‘grand theorists of history’ such as Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari for debunking, he remained firmly grounded in the academic realm. ‘The Dawn of Everything’, a collection of essays and lectures compiled with his collaborator David Wengrow in the ten years prior to his death, is very much of this mould: too interested in debating the ‘big questions’ to be rigorously academic, but too dedicated to the material minutiae and petty historiological disputes to sell a new ‘theory of everything’. In that way, it’s just as frustrating and enlightening as Graeber’s other work, and thus, a fitting final testament.

Let’s begin with the title. Perhaps a more accurate one would have been ‘The Dawn of Inequality: A New Pre-history of Humanity’. Graeber & Wengrow’s primary research question - with the exception of dull, Weberian digression on the birth of the state - is to identify, or at least challenge received accounts of, the origins of inequality. In this, they follow the great tradition of debating liberalism’s theodicy problem - if men are born free, as ideology presumes, why are we now so unequal? Unfortunately, they use as a framing device the ‘debate’ between a fundamentally Hobbesian and Rousseauian narrative of the origins of society - in the former, man is by his nature self-interested and to avoid a life that is nasty, brutish and short, binds himself to the rule of a sovereign. Whereas in the latter, man in his natural state lives in a state of primitive freedom and leisure, which he is seduced into giving up by the material comforts of ‘civilization’.

Graeber & Wengrow point out that this dichotomy, taught to hundreds of thousands of fresh-faced undergrads each year, is dull and limiting. But by framing the book in those same terms they do a huge disservice to the diversity of the ideological debate around liberty and inequality. On the one hand, Hobbes and Rousseau wrote more than a hundred years apart; they were addressing fundamentally different political, economic and ideological contexts and their juxtaposition in this way is an artifact of modern text selection. Moreover, both Hobbes and Rousseau are fundamentally pessimistic writers writing in the social contract tradition, albeit ones with different takes on authority: with Hobbes the authoritarian and Rousseu a sort-of proto-libertarian. Graeber & Wengrow ignore both the more optimistic left-liberal and materialist traditions and the reactionary critique of social-contract theory which sees inequality as a good and natural thing, actually.

A new pre-history of humanity

The other bit of false advertising on the book cover concerns its temporal scope: this is very much a book about ‘pre-history’ - the latest Eurasian civilizations we meet are the Minoan and Mycenaean Greeks, where conventional Western narrative history often begins. Perhaps that’s an intentional choice - after all, human history is much, much longer than recorded in writing. The insights and perspectives that these ancient societies can generate based on scant archaeological evidence are fascinating and represent the best parts of the book. We range all across north and south America, the ancient Middle East and into Eurasia and the Pacific, and while I have absolutely no doubt that Graeber & Wengrow are presenting the absolute cutting-edge in what is known about these societies, facts about them remain frustratingly just out of reach and many of Graeber & Wengrow’s implications are therefore necessary speculative.

At the outset, Graeber & Wengrow offer a convincing narrative about the origins of the inequality question in the European encounter with indigenous America. In this reading, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau did not invent the inequality discourse out of whole cloth, but instead were reflecting upon the perspective that native peoples had of European civilization - perspectives that were, as a result of French colonial empire, now available to bourgeois writers in the metropole. This isn’t quite right - French liberals had plenty of sixteenth-century sources about social contract theory, liberty and equality in both French and English to draw upon. But the Colombian exchange did pose the question of what rights human beings might have simply a consequence of being human - rather than as royal subjects or Christians. And thus, we are told, Rousseau and his contemporaries invented the concept of the state of nature by taking the ‘primitive’ but ‘egalitarian’ lifestyles of the ‘American’ foraging societies they were familiar with as representative. As we learn much later in the book, however, even those north American social bands which most approximated this ideal had adopted this way of life following previous periods of more centralised state-building - their relative egalitarian social structures were a choice, not merely a consequence of ‘underdevelopment’.

Graeber & Wengrow devote considerable space to advocating for a more fluid view of human social arrangements. Social structures are not fixed by material conditions, made irrevocable once a certain technological threshold. Rather, they note, many early societies adopted different modes of organisation at different times of year, coming together for hunts or festivals, and then dispersing, with very different social rules and hierarchies applying in each mode. A ‘king’ may have both the ceremonial and literal power of life and death at certain times of year, or in certain locations, but then be treated little better than an ordinary band-member on the hunt. Farming was not invented all at once, requiring investment in fixed townships, but societies used it from time-to-time as convenient, and abandoned farming just as easily as they invented it. Some hunter-gathering societies are rigidly egalitarian, others fiercely hierarchical. Egalitarian bands may enforce rigid material redistribution, with social rules to punish accumulation, while others encourage creativity and individuality within a materially poor culture.

Graeber & Wengrow also introduce the idea of cultural ‘schismogenesis’, the notion that neighbouring cultures may consciously adopt polarised social practices to create an exclusive sense of identity. In fact, they note that for most of human history, identity groups got smaller rather than larger, with tribes and villages adopting ever-more exclusive notions of group membership and curtailing the previous ‘freedom to roam’ enjoyed by ancient human populations. Examples include the ancient peoples of the California coast, who in the south enforced a rigid culture based on individual industriousness, and in the north fought and took slaves, who did the majority of the manual labour to support an indulgent ruling class. Graeber & Wengrow examine but ultimately dismiss the traditional materialist account of these different social modes, based on different ‘modes of production’ and the availability of surpluses in each ecological zone. Instead, they argue, these differences were a result of self-conscious self-differentiation against the ‘other’.

In short, there was nothing inevitable or pre-determined about the transition from hunter-gather societies, into agriculturally based city societies and the emergence of priestly and ruling classes based on the exploitation of these surpluses. Graeber & Wengrow marshall truly impressive evidence about the first cities, pre-dating those in Mesopotamia and Egypt by thousands of years, to show that massive groups of people - numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands - could organise themselves quasi-democratically and without leaving any evidence of social hierarchies over timescales of many hundreds of years. While everyone knows Tenochtitlan, capital of the ‘blood-thirsy’ Aztecs, few know the name of Teotihuacan, a city of 125,000 people organised on egalitarian lines merely 40kms away that flourished over a thousand years prior with pyramid-building just as, if not moreso, impressive. Graeber & Wengrow present documentary evidence to show that Europeans exploring the Americans fundamentally misunderstood that many of the cities they encountered were governed as republics, with rhetorical and political traditions vastly more sophisticated than were practiced in Europe at the time. Their evidence is very clear that warrior aristocracies usually tended to arise in frontier zones - forests, mountains and hills - and only move into cities later as conquerors. And just as importantly, the archaeological records show hints of the first revolutions against tyranny, thousands of years before Rome and the Gracchi.

Against the evolutionists

All well and good. But apart from their [understandable but irritating] abuse of European philosophy as a framing device, Graeber & Wengrow also take aim at another subject close to my heart by being highly critical of what they call social ‘evolutionism’. For Graeber & Wengrow, social evolutionary theory is synonymous with a certain late-nineteenth century, ‘progressive’ view of human societies as inexorably and inevitably moving through a series of fixed stages towards the capitalist mode of development. They note that almost the entire field of sociology - from the Marxist to Hayekian - rejects this kind of simplification entirely, yet Graeber & Wengrow continue to argue against it, arguing that it reflects what sociologists ‘really think’. While that may be right in some sense - people to love their simplifying categories after all, even bespectled academics - employing such crude caricatures a great disservice to cultural evolutionary theory.

Because, in fact, the kind of diversity and experimentation that Graeber & Wengrow identify is precisely the variation that a modern evolutionary perspective would expect to see in human history. What is missing entirely from Graeber’s account is the function of selectors in history - what makes these societies fail. We are told repeatedly that once-glorious cities are abandoned, and people move away. But why? We never know, and Graeber & Wengrow make scant mention of the role of war, disease and environmental change in history. It’s frustrating that in discussing the origin of the state, the role of war and war-making is barely mentioned. Perhaps the emergence of the state in the seemingly mono-typical form we know it today is precisely the consequence of these selective pressures being applied on an initially more diverse population. A true history of humanity would need to account for the emergence of the capitalist nation-state as a consequence of the large-scale European warfare and brutal colonial extraction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For Graeber & Wengrow, social arrangements always come back to a matter of ‘choice’ - not just individual choice per se, but the social choice of groups over time. Frustratingly, we are given no information, or even a theory, about how such choices might be made an implemented; given Graeber’s anarchist background, there’s a sort of perpetual wink-and-a-nod towards idea of community autonomy and self-governance. While the notion of social outcomes as social choices is certainly useful from a critical activitist perspective - it allows us to argue that another world is possible - it is not materially grounded. For Graeber & Wengrow, equality is an idea that we must choose. They do not, and cannot, engage from this perspective  in this with well-established liberal problems such as a nature of regime legitimacy, conflicts between the choices of the past and the desire of the current generation, and our fundamental lack of choice about the kind of society we are born into with limited ability to change.

A recommendation, with caution

Did I enjoy ‘The Dawn of Everything’? Yes. Did I learn things about human deep history from it, that I have not read elsewhere? Once again, yes. But am I persuaded that Graeber & Wengrow have genuinely offered a new ‘history [or even, gasp, a theory] of humanity’ that fundamentally challenges the staid and false dichotomy of Hobbes vs Rousseau? No. Unfortunately not. Like ‘Debt: the first 5,000 years’ or ‘Bullshit Jobs’, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ is full of interesting ideas that do not come together a cohesive whole, and which may one day be picked apart by serious academic critique. But for an undergraduate encountering these ideas for the first time, it offers a useful and engaging corrective to hundreds of years of propaganda that the inequality we see around us is somehow either natural or inevitable.  

Do genes matter? The hereditarian left wants you to act as if they do

The ‘hereditarian left’ is having a moment. I first wrote about this - still largely hypothetical - political tendency two-and-a-half years ago in the aftermath of the Sam Harris-Ezra Klein affair. That blog remains to this day one of the most viewed items on my page, largely I think because so few writers employ the terminology. That appears set to change, somewhat, with the publication of - and largely positive critical reaction to - “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality” by Dr Paige Harden. Harden was on the side of the angels during the Sam Harris affair but as a fascinating profile in the New Yorker makes clear, she wants her new book to persuade those on the left ‘who insist that genes don’t matter’ of the error of their ways. As the New Yorker accurately notes,

“Harden is not alone . . . Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammeled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” [Emphasis added]

Indeed, both DeBoer and Pinker have separately been crowing at the positive reception Harden’s latest has received. From the outset, I want to be clear that I’ve not yet read The Genetic Lottery, or DeBoer’s Cult of Smart for that matter. So this is not a book review. But I am familiar with both their work - I’ve cited Harden in the past - and despite his talents as a writer I’ve criticised DeBoer over his insistence that genetic variability in humans provides “the strongest possible argument for socialism”. I have no particular axe to grind with Harden and I trust, on the basis of other reviews I’ve read, that her new book is fair-minded summary of the science written by a world-renowned expert in the field and leavened with some standard social democratic politics. What I do take issue with is with the framing of the New Yorker piece - and Harden’s and DeBoer’s general thesis - that progressives need to be convinced that ‘genes matter’ and alter their political programs accordingly. But as we shall see, the real question is: what does it mean for something to ‘matter’?

Put simply, the argument of the handful of writers who make up the ‘hereditarian left’ is not dissimilar from that of the sex essentialists and evopsych gurus who argue for misogyny or against trans rights, or the ‘race realists’ of the like of Charles Murray and his many acolytes, or much of the heterodox thinking of the IDW [I’m not claiming they’re morally equivalent, just similarly fallacious]. All of these social movements and groups - containing an overrepresentation of aggrieved or wannabe scientists - argue passionately and at length that some observable trait (‘x’) in humans exists (or ‘is real’, or ‘matters’), which therefore [waves hands] justifies their [often reactionary] politics. When the left says we don’t care whether trait x is real, or that trait x ‘doesn’t matter’ to our politics, our lack of interest is caricatured with some snarl word like ‘blank slatists’ (Pinker’s idiotic term), science denialists or ‘cognitive creationists’. Whereas what’s actually happening is that the supposed heterodox thinkers are committing the most basic of errors - that of deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ - of trying to justify and legitimise their preferred policy positions on the basis of supposed natural facts.

Genes influence behaviour, obviously, but whether that ‘matters’ depends on your frame of reference

The intransitive verb ‘to matter’ is one of those English words that sounds significant but whose meaning is vague and imprecise. Dictionaries tell us its a synonym for ‘important’, or something we care about. If x is some trait or observation, then x ‘matters’ or is relevant only if there is some relationship or function f(x) that produces a desirable goal or output. However, the essence of political disagreement is that humans rarely agree on what goals are ‘good’ or desirable, and whether the methods used to get there are legitimate. In other words, two people can only agree to normative (‘should’) statements when they implicitly or explicitly share the same objectives. For example, we can agree you should exercise but if and only if we first agree that fitness or health is our common goal.

I’ve written before that perhaps the single largest philosophical challenge of contemporary liberalism is the ‘problem of inequality’. To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born equal, but is everywhere unequal. Once liberal societies granted formal, legal equality to all citizens, the question became what degree of social, cultural and economic inequality could be tolerated before the narrative fiction that all human beings are alike in dignity could no longer be defended. The various liberal theodicies which have sprung up in response to this question give structure and context to the vast majority of contemporary political movements. On the progressive side - which includes both the anti-capitalist left and various types of left-liberals - our view is that when people are unequal we should change society somewhat to improve their conditions. Conservatives - including mainstream centre-right liberals and reactionaries - think that inequality is cool and normal, actually, and that we shouldn’t take any steps that would alter the status quo.

So yes, genes influence behaviour to some degree. Obviously. How we measure that influence, it’s mechanisms of action, and how it interacts with other sources of variability including socialisation, environment and pure dumb luck, are questions we can debate. But the influence is ‘real’, in the sense that it is observable, measurable, and falsifiable. In much the same way, sex traits and sexed differences are ‘real’ and group differences in behaviour are ‘real’ - but there is a difference between a fact being real (or provable) and a fact ‘mattering’. Your chromosomes and genitals simply don’t matter to the social performance of gender, for example. Your skin colour shouldn’t matter for your access to civil and political rights. Many observable human traits are simply irrelevant to both politics and political philosophy. A fact is only relevant if it changes how you pursue your goals – and progressives and conservatives have fundamentally different political goals. Which suggests that the same things may not matter in the same way to different people.

I’m just spitting science, bro

Harden was a graduate student and protégé of Eric Turkheimer, a behavioural geneticist whose views on this subject I respect immensely. In 1997, Turkheimer wrote an essay in which he argued that:

“A psychometric left would recognize that human ability, individual differences in human ability, measures of human ability, and genetic influences on human ability are all real but profoundly complex, too complex for the imposition of biogenetic or political schemata. It would assert that the most important difference between the races is racism, with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago. Opposition to determinism, reductionism and racism, in their extreme or moderate forms, need not depend on blanket rejection of undeniable if easily misinterpreted facts like heritability, or useful if easily misapplied tools like factor analysis. Indeed it had better not, because if it does the eventual victory of the psychometric right is assured.”

So he, too, I think would agree that progressive engagement with the science is important in order to rebut right-wing attempts to naturalise inequality - but the science cannot then form the basis of a just ‘political schemata’. So, a brief overview of the science of behavioural genetics - at least as I understand it from Turkheimer’s work - seems warranted. The origins of the field lie in so-called twin studies (DeBoer, I think fairly, calls these kinship studies as their basic unit of analysis is family relationships). If two siblings with a known degree of genetic relatedness (r) are raised, by circumstance, apart - and then their life outcomes are subsequently measured - it is in theory possible to calculate the effective contribution of genes vis-a-vis other facts such as upbringing, environment and random chance. Heritability, then, is an estimate of the contribution of biology to outcomes - in other words, if you had a large number of clones of an individual, to what degree their behaviour would vary as a result of non-genetic causes.

Twin studies are notoriously difficult to design - human lives are complex, and the potential confounding factors are many. More importantly, however, because of their limited number of available subjects twin studies tell you very little about the genetic variation within the broader population and next-to-nothing about genetic variation between populations. A twin study cannot tell you which genes are influencing outcomes or by what mechanism they are acting - only that biological similarity plays some role. The second stage of behavioural genetics - which took place largely in the 1990s and early 2000s - was premised on the idea that advances in scientific knowledge, in particular the completion of the Human Genome Project, would allow the identification of the ‘genes for’ particular traits. This turned out to be a disappointment. DNA is rarely so simple, and with the exception of some single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with particular diseases, it turned out most genetic influence was pleiotropic - many genes influence many traits, through complex interactions and subtle influences that are often poorly understood. The challenge increases exponentially when we try to measure genetic influence over complex behaviours such as learning, sociability and sexuality.

Which brings us to the third and contemporary moment - that of the genome-wide association study (or ‘GWAS’). Readers may be vaguely familiar with the concept of factor analysis - which among other things is used in the psychological literature to generate measurement constructs such as g (for general intelligence). By combining the results of multiple tests (e.g. for language, spatial awareness, mathematical ability and problem solving), one can mathematically construct a single variable which best explains performance across multiple domains. A polygenic score is similar to this, but more complex by several orders of magnitude. Very sophisticated computer programs construct thousands or even millions of models combining the tiny influences of hundreds or even thousands of SNPs on an observed trait, settling on a model that offers the best statistical fit to the data. A polygenic score then sums up in a single variable the effect of all those genes - even if the specific identity of those genes or their mechanism of action remains unknown. Once again, these scores can produce quite good evidence of a genetic influence in diseases - the evidence, so far, for behavioural influence remains much weaker.

Turkheimer remains a vocal critic of the GWAS approach. Apart from the significant problem that a polygenic score is a statistical construct divorced from any investigation of the physical mechanism of action, the use of large data sets and machine learning to construct models means the field is doing something akin to ‘p-hacking’ - combing through data until an algorithm finds a result of statistical significance. The GWAS methodology is similar to the data mining approach used by many tech firms - the sort of analysis that predicts that consumers who wear red shoes on Thursdays are x% more likely to buy your product - and shares a similar problem in terms of model selection and validity. The most serious problem with polygenic scores, according to Turkheimer, is that the confidence intervals are rarely reported. A polygenic score may give you an estimate of the influence of your genes on, say, academic performance, but within a fairly wide band. So the predictive validity of a polygenic score for any given individual may be low - these are first and foremost population statistics. Large groups of people with particular scores may on average display the predicted traits, but the likelihood that any one individual will develop it is low. They are - like racial stereotypes or gender norms - poor predictors of individual behaviour and unsuitable for use in public policy formation.

As the New Yorker piece makes clear, Harden has moved away from her mentor’s scepticism in recent years - by all accounts, The Genetic Lottery is optimistic about the potential of the GWAS approach. There are hints in the piece at Harden’s evolving views - as a southerner with an evangelical background, a political ‘pragmatist’, and a successful white woman unaccustomed to receiving pushback from her left Harden is trying to identify the middle ground of these arguments. She highlights the importance of the genetic influence on behaviour while disavowing the dark policy prescriptions of the likes of Charles Murray and the race science crowd. But I - and most others on the left - would be sceptical that this is a line that can be walked, and definitely reject DeBoer’s thesis that it must be walked in order for the left to achieve its goals.

We just love debating tactics, don’t we?

The default progressive position is that we should remedy all social and economic inequalities regardless of cause. It’s not that genes don’t matter, is that no source of inequality matters. If your standard of living is below the poverty line we should fix that immediately without making moral or scientific inquiries as to why that circumstance has arisen. The real debate, if there is to be one, between the hereditarian left and other progressives is ultimately one of tactics (and oh boy, does the left love debating tactics!). To quote Harden from the New Yorker: “If you want to help people, you have to know what’s most effective, so you need the science.” In other words, is the left making our job of social reform harder by ignoring the science, as Peter Singer believes? Harden’s - and particular DeBoer’s - central contention is that in a realistic political environment, with limited space for progressives to pursue their priorities and the need to persuade others, the genetic influence on behaviour is a relevant source of inequality that should be factored into policy-making. Most socialists, for their part, argue that the dominant source of inequality is social structures and that until those social structures are changed, other interventions are likely to fail.

So DeBoer argues that education reforms have historically failed because they failed to take the genetic influence on cognition seriously. But perhaps a more parsimonious socialist critique would be that centrist plans that heavily focused on punishing teachers as part of an ideological project to undermine public schools were poorly conceived from the start. Until we begin to make serious structural changes to the allocation of resources in society, we simply cannot say that the material environment is not a significant factor shaping life outcomes for individuals. DeBoer and Harden would likely respond that kind of political and social revolution is impossible, and that the better political tactic would be to argue on the basis of luck-egalitarianism that the genetically disadvantaged are not to blame for their poor life outcomes, and that the state has a role to play in compensating for such undeserved inequality. Maybe, in the short term, they’re right. Luck egalitarianism is a respectable liberal philosophical position. But as the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written, any liberalism that is predicated on the unlucky demonstrating their inferiority in order to receive aid from their social superiors undermines the promise of equal dignity at the heart of the liberal system. And given the innate human concern for relative social status, we’ve repeatedly seen that subaltern groups know and despise when elites treat them with pity - which in turn gives succour to reactionary forces.

Not just tactics - strategy

One of the most important political lessons I’ve learned - from the comms specialist Anat Shenkar Osorio - is that tactically sound decisions can be counterproductive in the long-term if they cede the framing of an issue to the right. Even if the hereditarian left was offering tactically sound advice - that interventions based on genetic influence on behaviour were more effective and more persuasive in moving people to support them - it would be strategically unsound. Because conservatives simply do not care about remedying social and economic inequalities. So when the hereditarian left argues that genes matter, they inevitably provide significant succour and support to the right, who can say “Yes, we agree, genes do matter, because they mean that some degree of hierarchy and inequality is natural and inevitable.” Which tends to put an end to movements for social reform.

I strongly suspect that the reason so much of the literature on genes and behaviour is focused on intelligence and academic performance is to, in some sense, legitimise and justify the liberal meritocratic ideal. Academic and journalistic elites - such as Harden, Pinker and DeBoer - are products of an education system that has granted them access to outsized social standing and influence. As the French economist Thomas Piketty has described, the Brahmin left values educational competition because they see their own achievements in that field as legitimising their social position. But if universities are just printing degrees for middle- and upper-class children whose parents paid their way through adolescence, then the Brahmin left’s social position - and the liberal meritocracy they promote - is in some sense illegitimate. For Pinker and the classical [right] liberal IDW crowd in particular, if academic achievement is sorting on the basis of something ‘real’ and unchangeable (i.e. genes), then the meritocratic hierarchy - Jordan Peterson’s hierarchy of talent - is legitimate and defensible.

Conservatives are simply uninterested in changing the status quo to remedy inequality. Whatever Harden and DeBoer may think, the right are not looking to be persuaded on this point, or to persuade others to implement egalitarian social policies. What they are looking for is evidence that legitimises and naturalises inequality and hierarchy, which in turn makes their job of resisting change and persuading others to resist change easier. So when the ‘hereditarian left’ argue that seeking change to social structures won’t be effective in eliminating inequality, or that certain inequalities are fixed and unalterable, they are doing the right’s work for them. So politically speaking, the genetic influence on behaviour doesn’t matter for the left because, in the first instance, we probably can’t make use of it, and in the second, doing so would actively aid our ideological opponents. Plenty of leftists can be and are interested in the science - myself included - and relish the intellectual opportunity to debate its merits. But it simply has no bearing on our politics other than being able to argue against the genetic essentialists and race realists. And that’s where Harden, Singer, DeBoer and their fellow travelers are gravely wrong. The hereditarian left is a dangerous, dead end.

On Human Nature

Pandemic notwithstanding, my second book “Evolutionary Politics” will hopefully be published this year. Tackling the topic of sociobiology - in other words, the natural origins of social behaviour - from a leftist perspective seems likely to generate few sympathetic readings. For right-wing and centrist critics of the left, to talk about ‘human nature’ at all is to reveal the hopelessly naive, hopelessly wrong, or hopelessly authoritarian nature of the left. Perhaps as a response to this, to talk of ‘human nature’ on the left is to be seen as a hopeless cynic, an essentiallist or determinist.

Few interactions in which Marx and human nature are on the table can be productive, in my experience, because of the dominant practice in western thought is the categorization of the essential quality of things. How, after all, are we taught what a thing is? We might begin with anecdotal oberservations of an object, and use inductive reasoning to abstract some essential quality which is shared by all the objects of that category we have observed (most chairs have four legs, for example). Much of pre-modern philosophy was constructed this way. Scientific empiricism does not, in general, deviate much from this approach, supplanting imperfect anecdote with rigorous data collection, statistical methods and probabilistic inference. But the core metaphysical practice is the same - to construct an ideal category of thing (‘chairs’) which explains something useful about the members of that category.

What both many self-described Marxists and their critics fail to recognise is that Marx was first and foremost a philosopher - he only became an economist later in life - and that his work is actually embedded in a different kind of thought process. Marx never talks about a fixed ‘human nature’, but rather of ‘Gattungswesen’ or ‘species-being’. What is to be human therefore, is embedded in human life, activity and interaction: “The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity”. Or, as the sixth thesis on Feuerbach puts it, “The essence of man is . . .an ensemble of social relations’”. Like Hegel, Heraclitus and the process philosophers, Marx inverts the standard Western metaphysics. Rather than defining categories of things and studying the relations between those categories, we define the interactions and study things as the product of their interaction. A ‘chair’, in in other words, is anything used by humans for sitting.

This is something that the panpsychics and other big-brain wannabe physicists repeatedly fail to understand about themselves. One of the most common complaints about the Standard Model of physics is that it doesn’t tell us anything about what the fundamental particles ‘are’. We can describe their interactions in great deal, but for western metaphysicians the point particle is a singularity about which we still know knowing. Contemporary physics describes a gloriously complex universe made of overlapping fields and tensions, forces and probabilities criss-crossing physical space like waves on the ocean. Particles are merely objects defined by the interactions of these fields. Philosophically, or scientifically, there is nothing more we could or should want to know about them than that.

Evolutionary sociology for Marxists

I intensely dislike the work of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. I am frequently apalled by by lack of restraint on his utilitiarianism; I disagree with the way that he cloaks himself in the banner of animal rights to claim himself a progressive; and believe the outcome of his views are deeply reactionary. Singer’s 1999 pamplet, “A Darwinian Left” is referenced in my forthcoming book, but it stands as a warning of the wrong way to approach sociobiology. Singer argues for an intrinsic human nature which is fundamentally at odds with most of progressive theory and practice. Like Dawkins, the best Singer can find in nature is kin selection, which he argues explains some parochial forms of altruism towards our friends and family while undermining any universalist liberal pretensions. “Evolutionary Politics”, if nothing else, will offer an extended rebuttal of this line of thinking.

Evolutionary biologists do not think, or write, like Peter Singer. Evolutionary systems are characterised by the three processes of generalised Darwinism: variation, selection and (self-)replication. A population displays variation when every otherwise equivalent agent in that population possesses some property (s) which causes measurably (or ‘phenotypically’) different interactions with the agent’s environment. Every fundamental particle, for example, has identical physical properties and will interact with physical forces in an identical manner. Even molecules as large as proteins have consistent and predictable chemical properties. However, complex polymers (including DNA) can have variable properties while remaining chemically similar enough to treat as a population of interacting agents of a single type .

Selection is any process by which an agent in a population with property (s) receives a second property (u() which we call fitness, as a result of an interaction. Fitness can represent any property or payoff, so long as it’s acted upon by the third process (replication). Fitness can be almost any measurable quantity, defined in any direction: it may represent abstract utility, attractiveness, repulsiveness, warmth, chilliness, income, wealth, poverty, proximity to the colour ‘blue’, or degree of aural distinguishability from the sound of a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. In other words, the variability of the property (s) generates differential fitness (u). Lastly, replication is any process which relates the frequency of agents with the property (s) at time t + 1 to their fitness (u) at time t. While many chemical and nuclear reactions differentially produce output products, only a tiny subset of reactions maintain or increase the population of interacting agents. Auto-catalytic or self-replicating populations that also demonstrate variation constitute the complex system we label ‘life’.

The correct leftist understanding of sociobiology is therefore simple. ‘Human nature’ is simply any social behaviour which is generated from a natural, evolutionary process. Humans, as a species, evolved through natural (and cultural) selection, and therefore our ‘essence’ or species-being is as things adapted through that evolutionary process. As my second book will explain, that means both that the idea of a fixed human nature is untenable - what is adaptive in any given context will depend on the composition of a species’ population and its environment - but also that the potential for both cooperation and competition must be seen as part of what it means to be human. This is because both competitive and cooperative strategies can be evolutionary stable under the conditions of natural selection. Progressives are not, as Steven Pinker likes to claim, ‘blank slatists’. We merely reject the idea that empirical observation of human behaviour, no matter how rigorous, can tell us what it means to be human without an understanding of the complex causes (in Niko Tinbergen’s sense) that led to that behaviour.

The Marxist ‘New Man’

Over the decades following his death, Marx’s adage that human nature was determined by the totality of his [sic] social relations, morphed into the the ideal of the ‘New Soviet Man’, which continues to figure largely in the popular caricature of leftism. Many leftist thinkers, including most notably Gramsci, described convincingly how human social relations were produced by their need to support a society’s mode of economic production, and that the entirety of social relations were configured around the needs of capital. The leftist sociological critique of capitalism is perhaps, its greatest and most enduring intellectual contribution. But the idea that changing the mode of production by giving more control to workers would produce a ‘New Soviet Man’ of superior moral character is a bastardization of that theory. The ‘New Man’ is one consequence of changes in the social base, not the goal in and of itself.

Marxism is not a theory of individual morality. Leftists are not trying to produce better people; and any self-described communist who claims that as their aim is not a leftist. We do not believe that moral actions are a consequence of innate virtue, rather, moral actions are a consequence of moral social structures. The desire to discipline individuals is reactionary and conservative, not progressive. Confusing this distinction leads to Stalinist authoritarianism, and the critique of it from liberals. Human behaviour is a product of social relations and that as those relations change human behaviour will change without state interference. The desire to create of moral individuals is utopianism, and modern leftists should want no part in it.

Yet it is a vast oversimplification to reduce the Marxist contribution to a question of economic determinism. There is more to being human than mode of production - Marx and Engels were deeply, if passingly, also interested in the question of social reproduction. In this way, we can see how leftism and sociobiology are fundamentally compatible, rather than antagonistic, social theories. Social behaviour is in part the product of a species which has been subject to the forces of evolution. And it is also the product of economic relations, which vary from place to place and time to time but which share some transhistorial and transcultural commonalities. These two sets of relations define the broad contours of human nature. The force that bridges the gap between nature and economics is culture, which evolves in its own right and as a superstructure on top of a society’s economic base.

A new way forward

The same perspectice can be applied to any aspect of human behaviour. Thinking in terms of processes, and not categories, we recognise that it would be wrong to define ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in terms of some essential category, or catalogue those traits - good or bad - which we imagine to be possessed by some ethnic groups and not others. Instead, gender can only be understood as a relationship - an interaction which defines genders in terms of relations of oppression and subordination - which we label patriarchy. By the same token, we cannot understand ‘whiteness’ until we realise that it is defined in terms of its relationship with the ‘Other’. Ollie from Philosophy Tube has recently addressed precisely this point.

Similarly, we cannot and should not imagine that ‘rascism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘homophobia’ or ‘transphobia’ are innate, fixed traits. Generally, every member in good standing of a liberal society possesses a mental model of a person who is a ‘rascist’ or ‘sexist’ etc. We construct these categories on the basis of the observation of common traits - often traits that are communicated via the media rather than through direct observation. So a rascist is a person who uses certain taboo words or phrases, for examples, or a sexist is a person who sexually harassess and belittles women, and a homophobe is a person who engages in violence against sexual minorities. But when progressives talk about rascism, misogyny or homophobia we are talking about systems of interaction - no person ‘is’ a rascist, essentially; rather, we note that their behaviour reproduces a pattern of interaction between dominant and subaltern groups that affirms and reproduces those relations. The good news, as with evolutionary sociology and historial materialism, is that none of these traits are fixed and will adapt themselves to changing patterns of social relations, which we can influence through other means.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not apply the same way of thinking to ourselves. No activist, no politician, ‘is’ a progressive merely by some feature of their essential identity (I’m looking at you Elizabeth Warren, Anthony Albanese etc). Rather, progressive is as progressive does - a left-wing activist or politician challenges, critiques and reforms systems of power. Any politician who does not behave in this way - who through their actons reifies inequality and unjustified hierarchies, is not a progressive, regardless of how they may think of themselves, or be measured in academic journals. In the all-too-common reduction of progressive politics to the collection of essential identity categories - a gay mayor! a black president! a female CEO! - we witness the end of the left as a dynamic historical force.