Darwinian Conservatism [Paperback]

The one other review here by H. Gintis is nonsense. Arnhart is one of the most thoughtful conservative academic thinkers of our time. To get a peek at him look up the debate he had in First Things with Demski, Johnson et al. a few years ago. It's easy to find with Google.

This is a great little book jam packed with conservative ideas that are found only in dis-jointed form elsewhere. For example, where else have you read or heard discussed Hayek's idea of "spontaneous order?" This was a profound insight by Fredric von Hayek, and virtually unknown to most conservatives who think they know Hayek. At 144 pages you can read this book in an evening, and if you're an open-minded conservative you'll feel great and sleep well.

Those conservatives who have fallen for and swallowed whole the vacuous and silly arguments about "intelligent design" will admittedly have a little harder time with this book. There is no religion bashing. Quite the contrary. But the intelligent design claptrap is simply not accepted as either science or good religion.

If you are a center or center-right thinking person whose mind is open, or if you are a hard right religious conservative but have some room left in your brain for a little cognitive dissonance, this book and it's arguments will expand your horizons. This is a book that will be profitable even to those who ultimately disagree with it. But of course, if you read it you may be persuaded. Buy it!

Larry Arnhart is a serious, perceptive ethical philosopher whose works deserve praise (and to be read), but this book is a failure. The arguments are weak and will certainly fail to convince most "conservatives" to embrace Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Evolutionary biology is scientifically correct, which is the main reason it must be accepted by anyone, whatever their political philosophy (Arnhart does not stress this). However, Darwinian biology can be either used or ignored in making political arguments, so I will rephrase the issue as: are there good arguments flowing from evolutionary biology for conservative political philosophy?

We must note that at least in the USA, there are two quite different branches of conservativism, one espousing religious fundamentalism and the other classical economic liberalism. They have almost nothing in common intellectually and are simply politically linked by historical events. Arnhart does not stress this point.

Arnhart's arguments directed towards religious conservatism can be summarized as: (a) evolutionary biology is compatible with belief in God; (b) evolutionary biology recognizes and reinforces the notion that religious belief is a universal element of human nature; and (c) a strong adherence to family values is part of human nature. I agree with these statements, but Arnhart never addresses the burning issues, which include abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage, and state-religion separation. He does deal with intelligent design, which he rejects as a scientific theory. This is in part why I call his book "disingenuous:" he simply avoids the hard topics.

Turning to classical liberalism, Arnhart says that Darwinian evolution supports a Burkean political philosophy. I think this is a plausible argument, although Arnhart avoids all the hard questions by choosing as the alternative political philosophy an absurd caricature of the leftist alternative that is more or less 19th century Utopianism. Societies grow organically, Arnhart says, and cannot be socially engineered using the principles of Reason alone. Of course this is correct, but this is accepted by all relevant political philosophers today (except Peter Singer and his bizarre ilk). What about the proper extent of government, the treatment of poverty, the environment, and foreign relations? Nothing here.

I am not a conservative, and I don't think much of conservative political philosophy, but if I were, I would not be moved by Arnhart's arguments (I am also not a liberal, by the way, and in fact I think the liberal/conservative dichotomy is a sick joke, but that's a topic for another day...)

The attempt to justify conservative politics by appeals to evolutionary theory was tried, and failed, in the 19th C. by none other than Herbert Spencer. Social Darwinism, a more recent variant on a similar theme, had a brief renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately, it has receded into the dustbin of history. Now comes Arnhart in another effort to recreate a conservative paradigm, based on Darwinian science. It too fails miserably.

Fortunately, Arnhart has a fairly decent understanding of evolutionary fact and theory. His effort to "justify" religion on evolutionary grounds, however, is nowhere nearly as successful as Pascal Bouyers' excellent "Religion Explained." His understanding of kin relations accurately reflects the evolutionary insight that "commitments" to kin outweigh commitments to the more amorphous, less connected, society. He is partially right to insist that Intelligent Design be taught in philosophy or religion courses, not science courses; but philosophy will never abide ID anymore than science will. But what do any of these features do to "justify" a conservative political outlook? Nothing!

Philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously coined the phrase "category mistake," an apt phrase to describe this book. Simply, the rejoinder intends to highlight that what's true in one category of thought is not necessarily true when used in another. In context of Arnhart's thesis, science cannot be used to justify politics, anymore than Intelligent Design, a religious theory, can jump categories to explain science. Since Arnhart is aware of the latter "category mistake," why does he try to use the first?

This is not to deny that insights derived from one category are often useful to clarify insights in another. Indeed, sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in his superb "Consilience" advocates doing just that: Using evolutionary fact and theory to understand better all other categories of knowledge, from the social sciences to the humanities. For example, Matt Ridley in his "Origins of Virtue" artfully uses insights from evolutionary theory to clarify certain ethical approaches and their constraints. Arnhart seemed at first to adopt just this strategy, which might have been successful.

Hypothetically, Arnhart could have examined parallels with T. H. Huxley's evolutionary concept of the Struggle to Survive to help elucidate how Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, a conservative nostrum, operates extremely well to allocate limited resources. But he goes too far, by insisting that the competition for limited resources, a biological fact, "justifies" Hayek's spontaneous economy. It does not, indeed it cannot. If it did, feudalism would never have existed, only capitalism. The analysis of comparative practices do not morph into a raison d'etre. Parallels and similarities, yes, justification, no.

Consequently, Arnhart misuses science to do what it cannot do. Science tries to explain (reduce) natural phenomena in its simplest forms with empirical laws that can be verified by repeated experience. Politics and economics, the conservatives' concerns, are social phenomena that cannot be justified by natural theory and facts. It's a category mistake. Arnhart decries constructivism, but then turns around and uses the very thing he decries to construct justifications of conservative social structures using evolutionary theory.

If one understands the futility of Arnhart's project, one can still benefit from his efforts, not to "justify" conservative nostrums, but to explore parallels between evolutionary fact and theory and conservative nostrums. But be aware! Many savy "liberal" writers, such as Robert Wright, better versed than Arnhart in evolutionary knowledge, have argued more successfully for using evolutionary insights as inherited dispositions "to overcome."

Indeed, we can just as easily use evolutionary insights as features "against which" we can work around, using "liberal" nostrums instead of conservative ones. Just because the Struggle to Survive is inherently competitive does not mean we "must be" too. Using evolutionary insights, we can agree to "counter" our competitiive inheritance with deliberate cooperation to improve our chances in the Struggle to Survive. In fact, Elliot and Sobel in their "Unto Others" make this precise claim.

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