Pocket Protectors and Politics: Is (Stephen Jay Gould’s) Science Political?

We are no longer comfortable with the notion of purity. Perhaps this is our postmodern cross to bear (the very image of a “postmodern” cross, of course, reeking with the irony that buttresses so much that passes for the postmodern).

Plato believed that speculative thought led to the true reality. Experience deceived insofar as everything we actually experienced was subject to change. Truth was the immutable. Reality was borne by thought, not by concrete experience.

Thus abstract science (in this case, philosophy) revealed to us the truth of the cosmos and that truth was perforce consistent, rational, and pure. Even Aristotle (a far more down-to-earth philosopher) recommended a separation between the purity of the speculative and the messiness of the pragmatic.

These days, thinkers (and those that pass for thinkers) have mostly abjured the notion of purity and of truth. Instead, we have (wittingly or no) misinterpreted the Nietzschean insistence upon perspectivism in order to disavow any notion of an objective truth. Things are how I see them—at least for me. How you see them may be another matter, but most of our contemporary thinkers don’t really care what you see.

Let’s take an admittedly glib, but nonetheless apt, example: the U.S. Supreme Court’s the Supreme Court’s newest justice, Sonia Sotomayor. She has spent a decent amount of time recently defending her “Wise Latina” quip (the assertion that she “would hope” a Latina would make a better judge than a white man). She claims it was a rhetorical flourish that fell flat. If that is the case, she is a rather poor rhetorician insofar as she used the same flourish in several speeches.

No matter. The point is that in those speeches she claims, in contradistinction to Sandra Day O’Connor, that there simply is no objectivity. (O’Connor wrote that a wise man and a wise woman would basically come to the same judgment.) According to Sotomayor (and in conformity to Obama’s search for a justice of “empathy”), there is a qualitative difference between judgments made by people of different backgrounds.

Now this means one of two things. Either it means that Latinos are inherently closer to the truth of the world than anyone else (in which case it is a blatantly racist remark) or it means, ultimately, that there is no possibility of any such thing as objectivity. Period.

Let me make myself clear—or perhaps transparent. I am a Sotomayor supporter. I agree with nearly all of her court decisions. I firmly believe that she was rightly appointed. I also firmly believe that her “Wise Latina” speech is wrongheaded and counterproductive.

This is not what Nietzsche meant by his perspectivism. The fact that I am limited in my point of view does not mean that there is not an objective truth. It only means that my access to that truth is partial. There is a huge divide between this assertion and Sotomayor’s.

It may be the case (and always was the case, as Plato would acknowledge) that our access to truth is skewed by perspective, but that ought not to lead us to disavow our endeavor to reach the truth insofar as we are capable of it. It is a cheap truism that my experiences inform my ability to judge. An attempt to overcome the limitations of experience is the sign of a true judge (the very kind of judge I believe Sotomayor to be, despite her flawed rhetoric).

Book: Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution

Author: David F. Prindle

Publisher: Prometheus

Publication date: 2009-05

Length: 240 pages

Format: Hardcover

Price: $26.98

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/g/gould-evolution-cover.jpgAnd so we come to the subject of this essay: David F. Prindle’s well intentioned but deeply flawed effort, Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. Prindle’s project is one that I cannot help but applaud. He endeavors to expose the deep connections between the political and the scientific beliefs of a prominent public figure.

By all rights, this ought to be a stellar book, but it quickly flounders in its inability to forge any real causal (or even implicative) connection between Gould’s politics and his science. Indeed, Prindle offers us an almost immediate opportunity to gauge his failure by providing a rare glance into the process of publication. He reproduces two reader reviews that he received from a publisher other than Prometheus Books.

One reader excoriates Prindle’s project as completely wrong-minded insofar as science is an objective pursuit and politics play no role. The other reader revealingly claims that Gould’s “political and social views biased his scientific views” and that these “social attitudes… led him to his exaggerated views on the role of chance in evolution” (p.12; emphases mine).

The Confusion Between the ‘Is’ and the ‘Ought’

The Confusion Between the ‘Is’ and the ‘Ought’

Now this leaves Prindle in a rather precariously moderate position, and in this case the moderate position is not necessarily the rational one. On the one hand, reader 1 disavows any linkage between the scientific and the political. On the other hand, reader 2 basically disavows anything resembling the scientific. Everything is simply political.

Both worldviews, at least, can claim to be coherent. Prindle, in attempting to forge a weakly buttressed middle ground, finds himself steeped in contradiction. The problem arises from the “Credo” he includes in his introduction, in which he proclaims that he believes that “there is such a thing as objective reality in nature, independent of the human mind” (p. 12). Only a few short pages later, Prindle asserts that Gould’s “scientific ideas were seamlessly wedded to his political positions, so that his methodological and philosophical stance always buttressed his political values and vice-versa” (emphasis mine).

Let us think about this carefully for a moment-something that Prindle obviously never bothered to do. There are only a few possibilities here:

1) Gould’s pursuit of scientific method led him to certain political beliefs (Prindle explicitly denies this);

2) Gould pursued science in a more or less purist manner and his scientific insights fortuitously coincided with his political outlook, in which case the science is all that truly matters (this approximates the first reader response that Prindle rejects);

3) Gould held certain political beliefs and he twisted his scientific outlook to buttress those beliefs (this conforms to the second reader response that Prindle’s Credo contradicts);

4) Gould’s political beliefs predisposed him to certain insights into the truth; and finally

5) by some magic coincidence, Gould’s science and his politics not only coincided but were mutually reinforcing.

Since Prindle rejects the first three positions, that leaves us only with the last two.

Interestingly, Gould seems to endorse the 4th position. He wrote in a later discussion of his and Eldredge’s theory of “punctuated equilibria” (the theory that evolution is not gradual but rather development takes place in bursts separated by long periods of morphological stasis) that he might have been more open to the notion than previous scientists because he “learned [his] Marxism at [his] daddy’s knee” (a quip that brought him a lot of trouble from critics seeking easy dismissal of his findings). Over the course of his book, Prindle develops a rather odd relationship with this remark.

On the one hand, it is the only concrete source of his continual attempts to link his ideas concerning the interaction between politics and science with the ideas of Gould. On the other hand, he points out that politics do not lead (causally) to such discoveries inasmuch as Eldredge did not have the same sort of political upbringing that might have made him more predisposed to such insights (and Eldredge was the initial force behind the concept even if Gould quickly became its most famous proponent). This would seem to indicate, that Prindle is even skeptical of position 4 listed above (the only position even mildly endorsed by Gould).

This leaves us with position 5. But this proposition (that Gould’s politics and his science are “seamlessly”-notice that adverb-blended) fails to answer the central question: how does that work?

As a historian, I fully realize that causality is a difficult issue but it must be confronted actively, not merely dodged as if to say “well, look, Gould was a scientist and a political creature, so clearly there was a connection”. This kind of thinking allows Prindle to claim carte blanche with regard to the primary purpose of a book like this: to prove the connection and elucidate its nature.

Oddly, Prindle dismisses the notion that Gould’s Jewish identity had anything to do with his science. This is a telling move on Prindle’s part, as the following quotation reveals: “[O]nce we have admitted that his religious background undoubtedly sensitized Gould to certain issues, I think there is no explanatory power remaining in the fact that he was a Jew” (p. 25; emphases mine).

The highlighted portion ought to be familiar: the notion that religion or politics sensitizes one to “certain issues” is precisely position 4 listed above, the only position endorsed by Gould himself! Notice also that Prindle dismisses the importance of religion on Gould’s science because he does not “think” there is any explanatory value in it. This is also telling.

The problem with Prindle’s argument is that it amounts to the following: any attempt to avoid rhetoric is a rhetorical move (see pp. 25-39); any attempt to claim that something is not political is a political move (see the whole book). These are not arguments. They are facile truisms that most readers and writers probably thought were clever in grade school but happily set aside once they realized that one had to provide coherent reasoning rather than silly slogans. It is not that either statement is simply wrong (the nature of a truism is that it holds some truth), but rather that such statements are never enough.

But there is a greater point at stake here, and it has to do with that shady notion of purity, or better yet, objectivity. Sotomayor is doubtless correct. Our experiences inflect our judgments. But that is not the ideal of the judge. The judge’s ideal is the purely objective even if it is not fully attainable. An awareness of a viewpoint ought not to become a celebration of limitation but a reminder of present limits and the need to overcome them.

It follows that Prindle is also doubtless correct. Political beliefs inflect scientific work, but again, this is not the ideal of the scientist nor ought it to be.

And it is precisely here (in the confusion between the “is” and the “ought”) that Prindle makes his greatest mistakes and to my mind leaves open the possibility of the greatest trouble. Never mind the incoherence of some of his claims. (For instance, the discussion on pp. 166-68, in which Prindle demonstrates that Gould oversteps the bounds of scientific argumentation through a basic red herring, and then has the presumption to claim that this is evidence that science and politics are welded together. No, it demonstrates the exact opposite.

Insofar as Gould had political ambitions, in that argument he discarded scientific rigor altogether! Never mind Prindle’s almost-endearing inability to comprehend statistical measures and their relevancy to scientific understanding (at one point he seems to misread a massive block quote that he presents-where were the editors here?). Never mind the fact that Prindle repeatedly contradicts his own thesis and even has Gould’s writings refute that thesis for him (on the one hand, Gould is said to be against the notion of progress and merit; on the other hand, Prindle twice reproduces a comment by Gould that calls for a “democratic elitism” that allows people of merit to move forward).

The problem for me (and according to the writings reproduced within this very book, for Gould) is the sheer naïveté of the connection made between a scientific understanding of human development and the properly political concern with human sociality and morality. Even if it turns out to be true that men were biologically wired to indulge in promiscuity, it does not justify infidelity.

The fact that through evolutionary history some groups “won out” while others “lost” does not justify poverty or outrageous wealth. The same logic underwrites the notion that even if eating meat assisted in the development of our mental capacities, only the most die-hard meat-eater would proclaim vegetarianism unnatural.

Our biology granted us a faculty (rationality) that allows us, when desirable or necessary, to deny aspects of our biology. Therefore, all arguments that would consign human nature to the mere facts of our biological development are demeaning, limiting, and, I fear, disingenuous-a mere means to sucker the reader. Gould knew better and his writings attest to that knowledge.