Wired contributor Steven Johnson has a piece in this monthâs issue commenting on shifting alliances within the nature vs. nurture debate. I donât doubt that there are shifting alliances here, but Iâm a bit critical of Johnsonâs characterization of the underpinnings of âconservativeâ approaches to related policy issues. Efforts to array ideological groups on a one dimensional ânature vs. nurtureâ spectrum are hardly new, but I wonder if this map doesnât require at least a second axis to be at all useful.
Johnson first suggests that people âlean one way or the other [nature vs. nurture] because their political views led them there â the patina of science just makes the biases easier to hide.â Okay, fair enough.
He then writes that historically, âConservatives believed in the power of nature. If you rose to the pinnacle of society or sunk to its depths, you had only yourself to blame.â Now, this makes conservatives sound like a bunch of eugenicists. Even real lefties â which I think Johnson is not â donât usually accuse conservatives of favoring a smaller government approach because people are all helpless victims of their genetic makeup. Of course, if it really is his thesis that conservatives believe in ânature,â then the use of the word, âblameâ is incoherent. Why would any blame be forthcoming for acting in a manner determined by your nature?
Obviously, the missing ingredient here is the conservative embrace of the concept of free agency. Conservatives tend to believe in an atmosphere of relative freedom because they think that individuals can make decisions to transcend both nature and nurture. Perhaps we need to make this line graph look a little more like the Nolan Chart?
Johnson then attempts to bring us up to date by suggesting that âeconomic conservativesâ are trending toward nurture: âMilton Friedmanites are almost too attached to evolutionary theory. Darwin is invoked to justify the free market system: Rational self-interest is an innate strategy that capitalism simply reflects (âgreed is adaptiveâ). The only problem is that in recent years, evolutionary theorists have shown again and again that the instincts for altruism and social cooperation are a logical outcome of selfish genes. Communal society is as much a part of our genetic inheritance as competition is, which means unfettered markets may be more an invention of culture than an expression of our underlying biology.â
Now, I donât know of every fiscal conservative Johnson has been talking to or reading, but I donât generally hear capitalism and Darwinism compared except by enemies of the former. Comparisons of free market competition with evolution generally wrongly assume that both disadvantage the weakest members of society. In fact, free market competition benefits weak as well as strong swimmers by winnowing out ineffective institutions and strategies. The losers in the free market are poor ideas, not poor people.
Moreover, I donât know of any fiscal conservatives who believe that free markets are incompatible with civil society, as Johnson appears to suggest. Indeed it is precisely on âaltruismâ and âsocial cooperationâ that such conservatives rely for those social support roles they would have government eschew. Accordingly, it makes little sense to suggest that the place these impulses hold in evolutionary theory is an argument against the "naturalness" of market behavior.
Johnson, who keeps a blog that looks just like this one (the pitfall of templates, but I'm too ignorant to tailor mine), links to Reason and Andrew Sullivan. Now, he is hardly a political animal, blogging primarily about science and Apple Computers, with occasional forays into social commentary and network theory. Still, Iâm surprised that a writer so familiar with market liberalismâs pundits would unwittingly describe the movement in the manner of its enemies.
Posted by Marie Gryphon on February 25, 2003