From The Culture War is Coming for Your Genes by Damien Morris. In the past year there have been two major steps in the far left community to both acknowledge science and try and reconcile it with their ideological aspirations. A year or so ago Freddie deBoer came out with The Cult of Smart. deBoer is a self-avowed Marxist and acknowledges the role that genes play in creating natal inequality.
In other words, genes create inequality in capability. There is inherent inequality among individuals for reasons having nothing to do with racism or social injustice. If inequality of outcomes is natural, then how should a hard leftist acknowledge that and what can be done to build a more "just" society?
The second event was a month or so ago with the publication of The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden. Whereas deBoer is somewhat outside of the mainstream hard left, Harden is smack in the middle, being a professor at a prestigious university where Marxist mindset is the norm. Given the intertwine between mainstream media and universities, Harden's book has received a lot more attention than that of the more problematic deBoer.
The fundamental issue is real. We are beginning to understand the human genome more completely and it is increasingly clear that genes predispose people towards certain attributes and behaviors to a greater extent than we knew in the past. Genes aren't destiny but they are a strong influence.
Morris captures many of the issues arising for the left from this scientific reality.
Harden begins with an overview of the latest findings of behavioural genetics and explains how “genetic variation matters for understanding whether our children will succeed in school, will be financially secure, will commit a crime.” How much does genetic variation matter for these outcomes? The results are astonishing. Genetic differences between people account for around 40 percent of the variation we observe in the years of education they obtain and in their lifetime earnings. Differences in our DNA also account for around 50 percent of the variation in violent criminal behaviour. Equally sobering is the revelation that much of the remaining variation for these traits and outcomes is not explained by the family environment (“nurture” as we normally understand it) but from idiosyncratic environmental influences that make siblings in the same family different from each other. Results like these have been replicated repeatedly using different scientific methods and explode the blank slate narrative commonly peddled by activists and social scientists that the unequal outcomes we see around us are entirely the result of structural environmental advantages and disadvantages.
This is the interesting thing about deBoer and Harden. To date, the hard left has in general denied the science. Genes don't matter. Everyone is a blank slate at birth and each person's story is crafted through societal influences. Therefore all inequalities are due to social conditions. Harden and deBoer are saying what most the left have refused to acknowledge. Outcomes are substantially influenced by genes and differences between outcomes for individuals are only weakly related to the normally identified societal influences or social policy.
For the classical liberal, advances in genetic research have not been a philosophical problem. Inequality is already assumed to be the natural condition. Free people in free markets with constrained government is what is required to make the best of things. Not everyone will be equal but at the macro level, the pie grows and everyone is better off, even if not equal in outcomes.
For Marxists, that is unacceptable. Making everyone equal is the end goal, mot making everyone better off.
How, then, does Harden reconcile these results with her egalitarian political agenda? Not, to be sure, by promoting meritocracy. “Equal opportunity,” she writes, “will necessarily reproduce inequalities that are rooted in the arbitrariness of nature.” She therefore follows deBoer in explicitly disavowing meritocracy, approvingly citing a passage in which he writes: “Equality of opportunity is … a ruse, a dodge. It’s a way for progressive people to give their blessing to inequality.” Instead, Harden argues that it is “our responsibility to arrange society so that it benefits all people, not just people with a certain set of genetic characteristics.” She invites us to radically expand our definition of “structural” sources of inequality to include social environments which allow “morally arbitrary” genetic differences to give rise to unequal socioeconomic outcomes. She even goes so far as to describe societies like ours that provide such social environments as “eugenic.”
Redefining clear words to mean something different than they used to do is almost always a tell in the game of philosophical poker between Liberty advocates and Equality advocates. Redefinition means you don't have a strong argument. The problem is that it is a slippery slope. Redefinition leads to coercion. Coercion leads to failure. Failure leads to poverty.
Call it National Socialism, Fascism, Marxism, Socialism, Authoritarianism - they are all anti-freedom. And they all end in violence and poverty.
Whether self-acknowledged (deBoer) or not (Harden) both authors fall into the dystopian authoritarian category. One is just more apparent than the other.
Which policy prescriptions, then, follow from these plans to reshape society? DeBoer at least is forthright about the radical implications of his philosophy, openly calling for a socialist revolution and announcing that “to truly reconcile our egalitarian impulses with the reality of genetic predisposition, we will have to remake society from top to bottom.” By contrast, Harden’s policy prescriptions will appear rather anodyne to many readers (for example, a universal, taxpayer-funded healthcare system and a stronger social safety net). But, taken to its logical conclusion, Harden’s philosophy would lead us into far more radical territory than the tepid reforms that she lists would suggest. And by failing to acknowledge the more radical implications of her ideas, Harden also fails to grapple with the dystopian prospects inherent in an egalitarian project which views differences in socially valued traits as unjust.
"Fundamentally transform society" is another one of those tells that you are playing against a coercive authoritarian.
In most of the reviews I have read so far of Harden's book, the focus has been very much on a sentiment "Look, a leftist is acknowledging science" with praise and accolades following. It is a sentiment that brings to mind Boswell's quote of Samuel Johnson when discussing a woman preacher.Despite mentioning Communism several times in passing, at no point does Harden acknowledge the obvious link between her own egalitarian ideology and the principles driving Communist regimes that slaughtered, impoverished, and immiserated millions of people over the course of the 20th century. She notes that those authoritarian regimes succeeded in weakening the link between genetics and success compared to liberal, free-market democracies. But unlike those regimes, which brought this about by stifling opportunities for talented individuals (“levelling down”), the equitable society she envisages would break the link by “levelling up” the disadvantaged. However, the Soviet central planners didn't intend to stifle opportunities and make their citizens less educated and less prosperous than their Western neighbours’. They, too, thought they were levelling up. But they lacked the omniscience required to see how all the possible counterfactuals would play out so they could determine the “right” limits to inequality that would still allow their citizens to flourish.
And of course, if instead of viewing disease, poverty, and disability as social ills to be overcome we instead see inequalities in health, wealth and ability as the evils to be conquered, it will become irresistibly tempting to address those inequalities via the swiftest route: to intentionally level down, eat the rich, cut down the tall poppies. This is the danger the West’s canonical critics of egalitarianism have always warned against— as showcased by the Handicapper General in Kurt Vonnegut’s story Harrison Bergeron, THE MAJORITY’s totalitarian imposition of grey mediocrity in Jerome K Jerome’s The New Utopia, or the extirpation of elites proposed by the revolutionary socialists in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils: “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned.”
Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
The reviewers so far are enamored with Harden acknowledging science and have not focused on the substance and implications of her ideology. Morris is the first reviewer I have seen to do so.
But the most radical aspect of Harden’s philosophy is that it demands that we abandon our most cherished norms and values. Reconceiving justice purely in terms of social or redistributive justice, as she would have us do, requires that we abandon the traditional definition of justice we have used for millennia. For most people across most times, from ancient civilizations to contemporary secular democracies, justice has concerned the deliberate harmful treatment of some people by others: thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness. But in a curious moral inversion, the contemporary social justice movement has made justice about what society does to people. “People are not the problem to be fixed,” says Harden. “The problem to be fixed is society’s recalcitrant unwillingness to arrange itself in a way that allows them to participate.” In this strange reversal, the impersonal and spontaneous forces of society are imbued with moral agency, while the agency of individuals is radically diminished. Meanwhile, envy, previously a cardinal sin (thou shalt not covet), is transformed into the central principle of justice.
Morris draws an important insight.
The ethical challenge that each new generation faces is how to deal with the ubiquitous discrepancy between earthly reward and moral desert. In all times and in all places, people have looked around them and seen others who receive material rewards and public esteem far in excess of what their personal attributes and efforts seem to merit. They have likewise encountered talented, virtuous, hard-working people who succumbed to poverty or disgrace despite their noblest efforts. The injustice of it rankles and cries out for redress.
Our religious predecessors could meet this problem with stoic fatalism. On earth the rain may fall on the just and the unjust alike, but in heaven (or the other place) each will ultimately receive their reward. But in a secular age, this answer fails to satisfy us— and even the faithful, restless for worldly justice, long to see the kingdom of heaven built here on earth. Over the last three centuries of European thought, two answers to this timeless problem gained traction. The first is that we should try and align financial reward and social status better with true merit. The second is that no-one should be valued any more or less than anyone else. Meritocracy and egalitarianism were two radical modern solutions to the same problem. These two strands of idealistic thinking culminated in the two terrifying social experiments of the 20th century: the meritocratic experiment of eugenic National Socialism, which sought to elevate those with “superior” attributes while eradicating those with “inferior” characteristics; and the socialist experiments of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the rest, which sought to eliminate the undeserved differences between rich and poor. Both experiments culminated in totalitarian nightmares of mass coercion and mass murder. Yet both committed their crimes in the name of justice and utopia. Camus neatly captured this bizarre moral inversion, describing “slave camps under the flag of freedom” and “massacres justified by philanthropy.”
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