Motus Mentis

Last Saturday’s post was about the scuffle between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over the role of genetics in the varying distribution of cognitive, behavioral, and personality traits in distinct human populations (and over Mr. Harris’s association with Charles Murray, whom people like Klein accuse of peddling racism and “pseudoscience”). I linked to Andrew Sullivan, who had written an excellent article defending Harris and Murray, saying that if liberalism is to survive, it must be able to coexist with truth. (If you haven’t read it, you should.) Mr. Sullivan defends the “classical-liberal” position, which differs from modern, cryptoreligious “Progressivism” in its view of equality and justice.

For the social-justice crusaders of the present day, a pillar of the faith is that human variation in capacity and aptitude, to the extent that it exists at all, is entirely a result of cultural pressures and prejudices. This means that a society that tolerates wide inequities of life-outcomes is by definition unjust. If we’re all innately the same in every important quality, then social inequalities are incontrovertible evidence that the game is unfair — so we have a moral duty to attack the existing order, and to replace it with something better. The job will never be finished until results are equalized for all human groups, no matter how you slice them: sex, race, sexual orientation, and so on.

The “classical liberal” understands that this concept of equality goes too far. Clearly people are not all the same, and wishing that they were does not make it so. This means that when men are free their results will differ, and those with superior talents, aptitudes, and dispositions will come out ahead. The only way to prevent this is to rig the game against such people, with at least two adverse consequences:

First, advancement in science, commerce, art, literature, etc. — all the things that make high civilization pleasant and prosperous — is driven by the efforts of its most gifted and ambitious individuals. To hold such people back is to handicap the society as a whole.

Second, inequalities in outcome arising from the innate inequalites of individuals can only be prevented by restrictions or penalties imposed upon those who rise above the average. Those so hampered will not endure this gladly, so enforcement requires an inequality of power between those striving toward exceptional achievement and those seeking to ensure equalities of outcome. Who will win in the struggle to be at the top of this power-structure? As always, it will be those with superior ambition and ability — superior, that is, in the qualities that fit tyrants for their position.

Thus we see a sort of conservation principle at work: inequality, like energy, can never be eliminated. It merely takes different forms.

The classical-liberal model, then, accepts that there is an ineliminable tension between liberty and equality, and considers inequalities of outcomes preferable to the inequalities of power, and diminutions of liberty, that are necessary to ensure equal results for everyone. What matters, and must be defended, is equality of opportunity, and equality before the law.

Sullivan concludes:

When genetics are in a golden age, when neuroscience is maturing as a discipline, and when the truth about these things will emerge soon enough, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet. Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.

That liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it. When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble.

So far, then, we have two models. The first, which we can call Utopianism, assumes the absolute equality of all people in all things, with the implication that differences in life-outcomes are necessarily due to remediable social and cultural defects. Moreover, it asserts that human nature itself is malleable. The task before the Utopian, then, is constantly to re-engineer society, and the people themselves, until perfection is achieved. Because of these premises, inequality of outcome is in itself conclusive evidence of continuing social injustice, and proof that the job is not yet finished.

The second, “classical” Liberalism, limits its assumption of equality to rights and opportunities. If there is work to done toward a just society, it is only to ensure that all people are in fact treated fairly and alike by the law, and that nobody is arbitrarily or maliciously denied his inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. (After that, you’re on your own.)

Enter our reader Jacques, who, in the comment-thread to Saturday’s post, raised an important question. Here are his remarks:

But in reality the problem is worse than Sullivan thinks (or claims to think). Liberalism is supposed to be a “procedural” philosophy based on “civic and moral equality” as he says. But what exactly does that mean? How can there really be some set of fair and reasonable “procedures” or some notion of purely “moral” equality that isn’t ultimately dependent on assumptions about the capacities and dispositions of the people inhabiting a liberal order? For example, if there is some kind of procedural justice that liberalism requires, then at least all (normal or typical) citizens must share certain basic rational and moral capacities. Maybe they have to be capable of assessing evidence or applying moral standards without tribal prejudices or narrow self-interest. But then it’s always an empirical possibility that only some human groups tend to have these traits, or tend to have them to some degree sufficient for competently and justly operating these “procedures’” The same goes for “equality”. What is “moral” equality once we strip away any specific empirical basis involving psychological traits that science might reveal to be very unevenly distributed? It’s necessarily an article of faith at that point; but if liberalism depends on a faith that lots of reasonable people can reject, it’s no longer neutral and procedural; then it’s no longer just and reasonable under its own standards.

In the end liberals face a hopeless dilemma: (i) deny any empirical basis for their theory, in which case the theory has no clear meaning or implications for actual human life, and can only be given meaning if it’s grounded on some controversial transcendental belief system; or (ii) admit the empirical basis needed for the theory to be meaningful and useful, in which case no one knows whether its empirical basis is actually true and science might at any time demolish the whole thing.

Liberalism was never really neutral or purely procedural. It was always incoherent, oscillating between the tautological and the unverifiable. And that served a purpose, for a while — wielding power and imposing a substantive belief system, pretending to have no power and no beliefs. But that trick isn’t working so well anymore.

Jacques’ point, if I understand it correctly, is this: the functioning of a free society of laws and rights — a community in which order and social structure are almost entirely self-organizing — requires that people understand the limits and constraints upon their behavior that the laws, and the rights of others, impose. To understand these limits, and to be able to live within them, is a necessary precondition of individual liberty. Our laws acknowledge this: those who cannot understand such constraints, or who understand them but will not live within them, have their rights and liberties constrained. (Examples of such people are children, criminals, the profoundly retarded, and the insane.) Were society not to limit the rights and liberties of such people, the system would fall apart: the result would either be anarchy, or the imposition of an authoritarian, artificial order. Both of these are far from the “sweet spot”; both are curtailments of liberty.

A free and open society, then, depends on more than an abstract framework of principles, laws, and rights. Such a society necessarily consists of actually existing people, who must have both the capacity and the disposition to instantiate and internalize those abstracta as personal guidelines and constraints. There will always be, as noted above, classes of people who cannot (or will not) do this, and for them we have created elaborate public institutions: schools for the children, asylums for the insane and the feeble-minded, and prisons for the criminals. But these resources are finite, and are already stretched thin; for the whole system not to break down requires that there be at all times a large enough fraction of the population that does have the cognitive and behavioral capacity to be part of a free and largely self-constrained public order.

But what, asks Jacques, if the open, high-trust society we have created in the West is, as I have argued elsewhere, a manifestation of a distinctive population’s unique balance of traits and dispositions? What if the Western liberal system — a framework of individual liberty that relies on a citizen’s ability to assimilate and live by laws and rights and duties and other such abstractions — is part of the “extended phenotype” of, and depends for its existence upon, a distribution of heritable traits that, in general, only characterizes a broadly Western-European genome?

Whether this is true is not a matter of ideology, or of ethics, no matter how ardently we might like it to be. It is a purely empirical question about evolutionary contingency. The adaptability, in statistical terms, of distinct human populations to different sorts of societies may well be as contingent and empirical as the question of the suitedness of Inuits or Pygmies for careers in the NBA. To deny this possibility — to insist, beyond debate, that all populations are precisely equal in their adaptability to Western norms, and to full participation in Western civilization, with everything such participation requires — is simply a declaration of faith.

In addition, then, to the two models of equality we named above — the Utopian belief in the absolute equality of all people, in which Justice requires equal outcomes, and the classical-Liberal belief in a limited sort of equality that nevertheless assumes for all an equal capacity to participate in liberal society — we have a third, more “tragic” model that admits the possibility of innate inequality of adaptability to Western society at all.

This third model is not a new idea; it was the generally accepted view of human reality until the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, if this view is correct, it identifies a danger: if our society admits sufficient numbers of settlers without regard to their fitness for participation in Western-style liberty, or with their ability to internalize and be guided by the abstracta that are peculiar to Western liberal culture, that culture may soon be overwhelmed, and lose the ability to sustain itself.

Is the model correct? Well, we have a method in the West for settling empirical questions: we do an experiment. And as it happens, just such an experiment has been underway in Europe for several decades now.

Are we prepared to draw any conclusions?