Liberals And Babies And Trust Cues

NICHOLAS WADE’S new book Before the Dawn is a fascinating review of recent science in human prehistory. Genetic analysis of human remains can now tell us a lot about how humans spread across the world, starting about 50,000 years ago. But one aspect of the book is a bit puzzling. Every chapter has an epigraph from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, and not just a few words, but a paragraph that takes up most of the page.

What is going on here? Arnold Kling has the answer. The Darwin epigraphs are “trust cues.”

Nicholas Wade is a science reporter at The New York Times, and his book advertises news of scientific discoveries that might not go down well with his liberal readers. For instance, it turns out that chimpanzees are not quite the peaceable souls that decades of National Geographic specials have represented to us. Your average adult male chimpanzee likes nothing better than an aggressive border raid into the territory of the neighboring troop. The usual order of battle is for three chimps to set off into enemy territory and find a solo chimp feeding away from the rest of the troop. When they have caught their prey, two of them hold the victim down while the third kills it.

That might explain why humans have been so warlike over the years. About 65 percent of primitive societies are at war constantly, Wade writes, and about 30 percent of males die from conflict. The dawn raid is a favorite human tactic. You enter an enemy village at dawn, set fire to the huts, and then kill people as they run out of the burning huts to safety.

Wade tells his readers other disturbing facts. Genetic analysis strongly suggests that all men are descended from a single male, and all women from a single female. On top of that, race is clearly genetic in origin, and not a “social construct” as the American Sociological Association insists.

With all this unwelcome news to print, Wade and his publisher did the sensible thing. They put a Darwinian devotional at the top of every chapter. They knew that even though their readers proudly read The New York Times Science Tuesday every week, they really don’t like science once it moves out of the tenured university laboratory into reality. They are all for science until it interferes with their politics. But they all believe in Darwin.

How can we demand peace and justice if every man living has the instinctive need to conduct a nice little border raid next week? How can we stamp out racism if race is imprinted in the genes? And how can we justify tossing pushy Jewish kids like Larry Summers out of their Harvard presidencies if there really are physical, measurable brain differences between men and women?

These are inconvenient truths, and good reasons to put comforting “trust cues” into Before the Dawn to remind readers that you are really on their side.

Conservative married women are into trust cues too. They realize that a rational world of freedom and contract is not enough to raise healthy babies. What babies need beyond material things like milk and warmth are trust cues to teach them that they can trust that mother will always be there to take care of them. And father too. That is what Jennifer Roback Morse writes in Love and Economics. It was a hard lesson for her, a tenured professor of economics, to learn.

Economics is all about rational calculation: self-interest, rightly understood. Economists believe in the application of reason to economic relationships: equal and reciprocal rational agreements in contract.

When you have a contract, then you can break it. But what babies need, and what mothers need, is an unbreakable contract. You can’t get that with rational, calculating mothers and fathers, the kind that can do a Prisoner’s Dilemma analysis at every moment, calculating whether it is it their interest to be trustworthy or to cheat. As Morse writes: when someone calculates whether it is worthwhile to cheat, the game is over. That person will eventually cheat. “The person who never [cheats] is the person who never begins the calculation.” How would you deal with these cheaters and freeloaders.

Nicholas Wade writes: “Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem... It is religion.”

Now it’s a curious thing, is it not, that in our current secular society, in particular at the epicenter of secularity, Western Europe, we are having a real problem persuading people to have babies. Why would that be, do you think?

Perhaps in the low-trust society of secular Europe people just don’t get the trust cues they need before they will take the risk of having children.

Maybe they need to get away from rational self-interest and learn from Dr. Morse about “self-giving, rightly understood.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

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