Carrol Cox wrote:
> The
> question of the "origins" of altruism is a false question, and
> arguments for
> "biological" answers to this false questions are merely reassertions of
> bourgeois individualism.
>
This is to seriously underestimate not just Lalande et al but others in the
same field, some of whom Charles brown just helpfully reminded us of. The
famous Lynn Margulis/Richard Dawkins debate, for instance, also deployed
these terms ('altruism', 'selfish', etc). Dawkins' argued that evolution is
based on the selfish gene and Margulis took a different view, arguing that
the phenomenon of endosymbiosis, in which viral parasites combine their DNA
with the hosts to create a more survivable organism, is an example of
'altruism' and of co-operation in early life-forms. This is not an argument
from or about 'bourgeois individualism'. Scientists use the metaphors and
symbols already to hand, when trying to hypothesize or model-build. This is
like using toy bricks or any other material for modelling. There may be all
kinds of ideological resonances. Grant, Bacon's 16th century idea of science
really was patriarchal, but whatever its ideological and social
underpinnings were and are, science is not just ideology. Dawkins/Margulis
might have chosen a different set of terms to symbolise the realities they
were trying to understand, and thus avoid the accusation they were
anthropomorphising. But what difference would it have made to the results if
Dawkins had spoken of 'self-realising' genes instead of 'selfish' genes or
Margulis had spoken of co-facilitation rather than co-operation etc? The
methodologies and scientific rigour is what counts, not the labels they use
to identify different objects or processes. Moreover, Margulis for example
is not appealing to 'altruism' as a benevolent and worthy principle. It is
being argued that altruism and co-operation exist within evolution not
because they are nice ideas but because they are optimal adaptational
strategies for certain classes of species which are in the process of
creating evolutionary niches, within which 'altruism' is highly functional.
The argument was therefore never about 'altruism' v. 'egotism' per se
(presumably not even Arne Naess believes that viruses are altruistic). What
the 'coevolutionists' are trying to decide is what principles are at work in
the self-construction (emergence) of complex, holistic systems. The
emergence of such systems might be contingent but is non-arbitrary. S J
Gould is wrong to say that if the evolutionary tape was replayed we would be
unlikely to get capitalism again (if he said exactly that). The thrust of
historical materialism is to propose that capitalism is the
historically-inevitable end-point for societies of commodity-production and
exchange: that is, under capitalism alone are unfolded all the developmental
potentialities which lay hidden (immanent) within the commodity-form for at
least 2 500 years after the invention of coinage.
It is true that the ready availability of fossil fuels and the technical
ability to exploit them are the somewhat coincidental features which made
possible the last 250 years of industrial capitalism, but *what was made
possible* was *the emergence of what was already immanent in the
commodity-form*. Coal + steam engines are not *intrinsically* necessary to
capitalism. But the commodity-form of value *is*. It would have been an
unlucky accident if capitalism had *not* happened, since it would mean we
should never have emerged from the stage of so-called "advanced organic
societies". For capitalist markets to function, altruism must have already
become more widely-generalised than in, say, feudal society, where altruism
was associated with chivalry (a minority pastime) rather than commerce or
the world of labour. One of the most telling events of the 'longue duree'
was the seeping into popular consciousness of the characteristic ideas of
the French Enlightenment. Without the spread of these notions, capitalism
could not survive, for only when the behaviour of the individual subject
becomes formalised and predictable are true mass societies possible. Kant's
"moral law": "Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become a maxim
of universal law" depends upon the notion that humans are rational, i.e.
altruistic. The one volume Columbia Encyclopaedia puts it much better than
does the Britannica: "This law has its source in the autonomy of a rational
being, and it is the formula for an absolutely good will. However, since we
are a member of two worlds, the sensible and the intelligible, we do not
infallibly act in accordance with this law but on the contrary almost
always act according to inclination. Thus, what is objectively necessary,
i.e., to will in conformity to the law, is subjectively contingent; and for
this reason the moral law confronts us as an 'ought'.
Incidentally, Charles Brown properly reminds us that Lalande et al are
hardly the first to argue this kind of thing, and in fact the themes of
necessity/contingency and of the relationship between moral law and
universal order, also predate Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) but it was Kant who
synthesised these realms of thought, which is why he himself called his work
'A Copernican revolution in philosophy'. As the Columbia concisely puts it:
"Instead of assuming that our ideas, to be true, must conform to an external
reality independent of our knowing, Kant proposed that objective reality is
known only insofar as it conforms to the essential structure of the knowing
mind. He maintained that objects of experience-phenomena- may be known, but
that things lying beyond the realm of possible experience - noumena, or
things-in-themselves - are unknowable, although their existence is a
necessary presupposition. Phenomena that can be perceived in the pure forms
of sensibility, space and time, must, if they are to be understood, possess
the characteristics that constitute our categories of understanding. Those
categories, which include causality and substance, are the source of the
structure of phenomenal experience. The scientist, therefore, may be sure
that the natural events s/he observes are knowable in terms of the
categories. Our field of knowledge, thus emancipated from Humean scepticism,
is nevertheless limited to the world of phenomena."
The Columbia article rightly concludes: "The results of Kant's work are
incalculable." The Kantian system was swiftly subjected to the merciless
criticisms of GWF Hegel (1770-1831) and then of Karl Marx (1818-1883), but
this is because they, like all contemporaries, understood its great
significance: in historical terms, Kant created the noumenal architecture of
the future no�sphere. He severed the final links which had previously bound
social consciousness to a prescientific world-view, thus the Kantian
synthesis freed the human evolutionary niche from its dependence on
surrounding nature and placed homo sapiens in the position of ultimate
arbiter of evolution itself.
More later, I gotta go.
Mark
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