From Marxism to (methodological) nihilism (via sociobiology)

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I was thinking again about Thomas Sowell's book which I mentioned back in March. Then I said:

"Great analysis of Marx's sociological and economic thinking. Best summary if you are already familiar with the economic concepts (c + v + s etc). But his conclusions, where he indicates why he is no longer a Marxist, are just ... terrible. Not wrong: just superficial, lacking insight.

Example thought: 'Marx's economics work is not used by modern economists: it's like it never existed at all'.

Right." [1]

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This is what I think Thomas Sowell should have said.

So here's the problem, well-rehearsed in the literature. It's not conceptually hard to understand societies in terms of organised and recurrent patterns of human behaviour. Modes of production are not hard either: they reflect different ways of organising viable human life whether by hunting and gathering; nomadic pastoralism (and raiding); agrarian slave-societies; feudalism - another agrarian form; capitalism - based on the separation of the mass of people from their own means of livelihood plus private ownership of the means of production; or state-socialism - where the means of production are (mis-)managed and (dis-)organised by a centralised bureaucratic state.

Marx does a good job of telling it like it is about the actual workings of capitalist economies - and other modes of production although his main interest and focus is capitalism. His is an insightful sociology. It has the ring of truth. Lots of consequences make sense, like the presentational-weakness of the state in advanced (pure) capitalist economies - the state is a servant, a tool of a status-quo, it supports the elites rather than being the elite itself, as it would be in more coercive modes of production.

But conventional Marxists admit that their doctrine does a poor job in explaining the family, nationalism and any form of society superseding capitalism. Again, the reason is familiar: human nature was under-theorised, over-abstracted and rose-coloured in Marx's own writings (species-being). Later in the tradition, blank-slateism, the theory that there is no human nature, it's all 'socially-conditioned' (what is this causal thing called society, I wonder?) became definitive, perhaps as the guarantor that communism could really be both different and even possible.

It's tempting instead to cite the relevant evolutionary biology, to think through what kind of agency biological humanity actually is. And there is a modern, well-attested sociobiological corpus to draw upon. We have a narrative about a rather physically-weak, highly-social but xenophobic primate still driven by primal needs as refracted through a strongly-social organisation.

The interesting sociobiological challenge: how to explain ultrasociality, the creation of mass non-kin societies unique in the animal kingdom? And the answer: people only really care about their kin and close friends, where said emotions mediate inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism. What is unique about humans is symbolic affiliation: rallying around the flag of some idea (nation, ideology etc).

Mediated by language and signs, enabled by language and abstraction, conducted in terms of fictive kinship (brothers and sisters, mother and father) the scalable results create an environment of superior fitness for those who can make it work. Empires are good for gene propagation, especially the trickle-down genes of elites.

This emergent, sociobiological truth does not bode well for the messianic side of Marxism which, after all, is the driver of its politics. If humans are like that, happy to have their biological needs fulfilled with food, shelter, mates, projects and causes, isn't capitalism sort of getting the job done? And doesn't the unbounded altruism seemingly required of a post-capitalist mode of production seem rather ... infeasible?

As E. O. Wilson famously remarked: wonderful theory, wrong species - he considered Marxism more suited to clone-ants than to humans.

So you can fix Marxism, complete it even, but then you see that all the moralism (evil capitalists, heroic proletarians, oppressed 'minorities') simply expresses the biological imperatives of groups in their different positions within the mode of production. And equally, of course, the biological needs of those articulating Marxist/leftist critiques in their own bids for status and position.

And it ceases to be clear that capitalism can't successfully address the biological (including the psychological) needs of those within its specific form of social organisation. And it becomes very unclear whether there even exists a variant form of social organisation which better leverages human psychology.

Of course, one can always envisage modifying human psychology itself - we could engineer human ants, the ultimate in human-domestication.

So a corrected, improved Marxism rooted in an evolutionary, genomically-informed sociobiology is a superior sociology. It's still subversive of elite status games, economic fractures and self-serving narratives but it crucially lacks a normative directional impulse. Crudely, it tells you how it is but does not suggest anything special to do about it, nor does it speculate teleologically about any predicted or superior future.

It gets worse. Once we conceptualise human beings as just a bundle of sophisticated biological drives, a bunch of self-replicating systems honed by evolution to be rather successful at time-of-writing, we see ourselves reduced (in the technical sense) to just another fascinating phenomenon of physics and chemistry. Who would have thought ...

The collapse of normative discourse into mere description: the ethics and manifest destinies of electrons, protons and neutrons.

Welcome to Nihilism: the derangement of the unanchored intellect.

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I myself try to resist this slide, despite its utterly compelling logic. I take my, frankly emotional, recourse in this formulation due to Lukács:

"Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.

Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders."

Dialectical materialism: an agent-centric view of situated history, carried through by real, biologically-valid human beings in the ecological circumstances in which they find themselves.
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Notes

[1] Marx was trying to analyse and understand capitalism as a particular form of human social organisation. This is not interesting to 'modern economists' who are trying to analyse for policy purposes the behaviour of firms, banks and governments within that mode of production. The human-activity substrate is abstracted away in favour of model-attributes represented by differential equations and equilibrium conditions. As a rough analogy consider the difference between a sports psychologist and a referee or umpire.
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