Re: sociobiology: real and imagined

Boris Stremlin allowed sociobiologist E.O. Wilson to speak for
himself.  It was a useful contribution to the discussion, and I
agree with some of the points Boris made in his thoughtful anaysis. 
However,  the overall effect misrepresented Wilson as more benign and
reasonable than he actually is.  Below is a slightly revised and
updated critique of Wilson's "Consilience" that I presented last year at
the Southern Sociological Society meeting.  I also quote extensively
from Wilson.  I believe that Wilson, from Sociobiology (1975) to
Consilience (1998), has consistently set forth both a program and a
theory that is an ideological justification for fascism.

Steve Rosenthal

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

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.