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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"The Son Also Rises" - Gregory Clark

Here is how The Economist reviewed Gregory Clark's "The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility."

"Periods of great inequality are good for social theorising. Last year Charles Murray, a libertarian columnist and pundit, warned in “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” that mating among people of similar means is increasing the divide between a motivated elite and a listless underclass. In “Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy”, another commentator, Christopher Hayes, showed how the elite are using their resources to circumvent the meritocracy and establish a permanent upper class. Now the fray is joined by Gregory Clark, a Scottish-born economic historian at the University of California, Davis. In “The Son Also Rises” he argues that social mobility is low everywhere and always will be, and there is nothing society can do about it.

"Mr Clark has waded into these waters before. His 2009 book, “A Farewell to Alms”, reckoned that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was attributable to faster breeding among the rich, which raised the population’s underlying competence. Critics pounced, crying that the book was thinly sourced. Perhaps for this reason, he has armed his new book with reams of data. Most of the text is given over to methodical presentation of research, with the uniting theme that optimistic assessments of mobility are badly wrong.

"Conventional research has it that society is highly fluid: the effect of inheritance is almost nil in some Nordic societies, and family explains no more than 25% of an adult child’s status in America, which has always been less mobile. But Mr Clark points out that these studies track change over just two or three generations and are therefore biased by quirks of fate: the working-class lottery-winner or the scion who chooses social work over high finance. Longer projects average out this randomness and paint a darker picture.

Mr Clark draws upon research that uses surnames to track status over centuries. The academics he follows have mined sources as varied as the Domesday Book, the Royal Society’s records, even membership of the American Medical Association, in order to find surnames that are over-represented in elite positions. Researchers then track how long it takes those monied surnames to lose their wealth-predicting power.

"With surprising consistency across countries and eras, mobility is found to be painfully slow. Birth has predicted more than 50% of one’s income or education status, Mr Clark reckons. Erasing the legacy of past prosperity takes 10-15 generations rather than the three or four implied by sunnier estimates. So the shadow of 18th-century wealth still darkens income distributions today.

"That is the most unexpected finding. Efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no discernible effect on mobility, leading Mr Clark to conclude that mobility is strongly linked to underlying social competence—an “inescapable inherited” trait. Only the intermarriage of people who are more prosperous and educated with those less fortunate will dilute the genetic resources of well-off families, slowly pushing them back towards the average and preventing the rise of a permanent overclass.

"Oddly, Mr Clark judges the world to be “a much fairer place than we intuit.” He explains this by stating that the rich acquire their wealth because they are clever and work hard, and not because the system is rigged. The world is less corrupt and nepotistic than people might think.

"This conclusion gives the book a cheery tone, but there are also plenty of nasty conclusions to be drawn. One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

"That is a weakness. Mr Clark is too quick to write off the promise of recent social changes. The oldest Americans born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act are barely 50. Impressive work on the effect of good teaching or well-targeted poverty assistance suggest such programmes make a difference. Yet Mr Clark follows his logic to an unexpectedly egalitarian end. Redistribution is sensible, he argues, not in order to boost mobility but because mobility is intractably low. The cream will rise regardless, and so paying extraordinary salaries to capable workers is unnecessary. If high rates of mobility are used to excuse or justify inequality, he suggests, then the reality of low mobility implies something quite different: that great inequality serves little purpose and redistributing income from the rich to the poor might raise overall welfare at little economic cost. This makes for uncomfortable reading for those of all ideological persuasions."

Clark is largely content to examine the data he and his team researched in the context of his mathematical model of social mobility (a first-order Markov social-mobility diffusion process) without imposing any personal agenda. His public-policy thoughts are restricted to a chapter at the end where, as The Economist notes, he expresses an ethical preference for Nordic-type societies.

It's useful at this point to note the correlation at the state level between individual willingness to countenance large transfer payments and the degree of ethnic cohesion within that state - Clark doesn't and as a consequence fails to note that this pleasant outcome is unlikely to come to pass in the United States.

A small aside: reviewers who wish to exhibit their impeccably PC credentials include words such as "nasty", "genetic determinism" and "racist" in their reviews. These terms, devoid of scientific meaning, invariably demonstrate high-minded distaste replacing possibly-dangerous rational thought.

Clark's book is an easy read if you know some statistics* and are interested in the history of diverse populations from Chile to China via the US, UK, Scandinavia, the Middle-East, India and Japan. His probabilistic social-mobility model is simple yet makes powerful counter-intuitive predictions. These are backed up by the voluminous data-sets he's managed to analyse. You also get advice on who to marry.

The world still divides between those social scientists who think that genetics (i.e. inherited differences between people and populations) are irrelevant as everyone is born identical for social-outcome purposes, and those who are tracking the latest research in population genetics and DNA analysis as they shed new light on sociological, economic and political issues. The latter camp is slowly gaining respectability as more hard data becomes available and Clark's book is a breath of fresh air in this developing paradigm.
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* Correlation coefficient, regression to the mean, normal distribution, standard deviation, variance, time series.