Kuhn – Becoming Human

For those who do not know it, “Sex at Dusk” is a book by Lynn Saxon which purports to “debunk” Sex at Dawn. Everyone seems to be agreed that Saxon has a lot of science at her fingertips and that this unreadable book nevertheless makes a number of valid points.

What people are missing in this debate is, however, fundamental. It seems to me that Saxon commits an error of method, epistemological in nature, and an error of genre.

The question in which the readers of Sex at Dawn are interested is what is the most plausible account of evolved human sexuality given the balance of the evidence. This question is not answered by pointing out errors and misinterpretations in the book. Even if couched in scientific terms, this comes pretty close to an ad hominem attack. On the contrary, given all the obvious societal interests vested in the “standard narrative”, it is the scientific underpinning of that narrative regarding which we should be particularly attentive and skeptical. This is clear from Kuhn, Popper, Bourdieu, and any number of other philosophers and sociologists of science. If you have to choose a null hypothesis, it would be better to go with S@D and not with the standard narrative because this would at least counterbalance to some extent almost everyone’s internalized biases. This would be good and correct scientific method, just as it is the church that should have had to prove the terracentric view of the universe and not Galileo the heliocentric one, once 51% of the evidence was on Galileo’s side. What evidence is there that S@D’s conclusions are wrong, not just that the authors made some errors getting there? The conclusions can only be wrong (in the normal sense of this word within the social sciences) if there are other conclusions which are more plausible. What are these conclusions? A vision of a more “polyamorous” ancestral environment is not scientifically suspect just because the Church Fathers have indoctrinated us with the idea that it is morally suspect. This is an epistemological error which I personally find inexcusable on the part of a contemporary social scientist.

This brings me to the error of genre. S@D is a work of popular science. The intention of the authors is demonstrably to affect the terms of the broader, and hugely important, social debates which sexuality feeds into. They do this by presenting science, but they are allowed, and even required, to be selective given how biased much of the “evidence” is. They are even allowed (thank you, Seneca) to make mistakes. It is a book with an agenda (as all books have an agenda, for, as Derrida famously observed, “there is no text without context”). That is why Saxon’s book can only be an ad hominem attack. Her choice of method condemns her to this. If Saxon believes the balance of evidence points towards monogamy then that is the book she should write. This would, however, be surprising as I think one of the criticisms one might make of S@D is that the “standard narrative” is not actually a standard narrative from a scientific perspective. What it is, is a socially standard narrative (something very different) which is a hidden bias in much scientific writing, especially the more distant the theme of that writing is from actually investigation into evolved human sexuality. Saxon’s book, less excusably given its subject matter, inadvertently proves the point. Barash and Lipton (The Myth of Monogamy, 2001) do the same when they show that we are not naturally monogamous and then claim that we “should” be anyway.

The point is that what we “should” be is up for grabs. We no longer have to take Plato’s word on it. This emancipation from the patriarchal bias in classical moral thought around sexuality, so brilliantly analyzed by Foucault (The Use of Pleasure, 1984), is what S@D sought to achieve, and what it has achieved. S@D has been justly successful in reaching its goals because it is engaging, humanistic, humorous, optimistic, and entertaining. This is how you change the world, if you are courageous enough not merely to analyze it, and particularly in ways that have an unrecognized bias towards the status quo. Wanting to change the world is not illegitimate and the fact that so many in the scientific community seem to think it is shows, I think, something of the power relations between vested social interests and the scientific establishment.

I am not saying that S@D is the last word on the subject, or even that it is a Copernican moment (and the authors are very quick to disown such an idea, as witnessed by Chris Ryan’s comment on one of my earlier articles). There are elements in the conclusions which I myself have argued are incomplete. In a way, in places it’s an engaging caricature. Perhaps this is a moral failing on my part, but I find it hard to be appalled by that. I think what it nevertheless is, is a brilliant popularization of the relevant science combined with true wisdom and compassion for the human condition. This makes it, as I think its short history has shown, a defining moment in the Kuhnian process (which is to be interpreted in a post-structuralist sense given the nature of “truth” in the social sciences(*)) by which one scientific paradigm is replaced by another. The authors achieve this by undermining the forces which maintain the status quo. They manage to dissipate some of the fear inculcated in us by established social discourses according to which we have to hang on for dear life to the disintegrating institution of monogamy because of the imagined catastrophic social consequences of giving it up; rather, we can trust our biology and imagine better ways of ordering our affairs than those which served Roman and later European militaristic expansion so well, and therefore survived that “evolutionary” race, but perhaps are not relevant to life on the planet in the 21st century.

Note

* Cf V. Romania (2013), Pragmatist Epistemology and the Post-Structural Turn of the Social Sciences, in Philosophy Today, Summer 2013 (link).

PS: Before anyone is tempted to conclude anything from the ratings of Saxon’s book on Amazon, do recall selection bias and confirmation bias…

I have just finished reading Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s Sex at Dawn. The book is such a revelation that it is hard to know where to start. This is not only one of those books that will change your life. It’s going to change a whole lot else too.

The experience one has reading it is much akin to the one I had five years ago when I attended my first tantra workshop. A whole load of stuff that previously existed as isolated islands, unconnected, suppressed or misunderstood, suddenly falls into place – in this case not only things I have felt inside, but numerous aspects of the contemporary world as well. Reading the book launches me into filling in many of the gaps it leaves open, as well – something I will no doubt be doing over the next series of posts.

For those who don’t know, the books central thesis is that humankind evolved as a group-living, cooperative species in which sexuality was shared and played an important social role in building and maintaining group ties.

I am totally convinced. Not just by their breadth of argument, though it is impressive. Above all, it just. makes. sense.

There are enough summaries of the book elsewhere, from every conceivable viewpoint, so I won’t attempt another (though I would advise you to read it yourself). In this post, I want to try to qualify the book and give a preliminary assessment of its importance.

Although basing itself widely on earlier work and despite its conversational tone – which heaps ridicule on conventional thought – this is a book which is likely to be as fundamental to humankind’s self-understanding as was Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. In a way, it is a completion of Darwin’s thought. The voyage of self-discovery on which Darwin launched our species has now come into port; and whilst there is surely much still to be discovered and said and plenty of meat to put on the bones, the essential features of that destination are now known.

Coming to terms with them under the conditions of modern life is going to be more of a challenge. In the first place, Ryan’s and Jetha’s conclusions are going to be subject to a bitter rearguard action. Far too many vested interests, many of them household names, are going to find it difficult to climb down from the positions they have taken; and especially when assailed with so little pity. Such vested interests are not only in academia of course, but across the spectrum of society. It looks to me like we are in for the last, and I fear not universally peaceful act in the culture wars which started with Copernicus and Galileo.

It’s time to take sides in those culture wars, or as the authors challenge us in their closing chapter, very aptly, to “come out”. If you recognize yourself as a member of the species they describe, now is the time to say it. Subgroups defined on the basis of sexual orientation or preferences have fought numerous partial wars in the past (and go on, of course, doing so today). Now, though, we have an overarching label for all these struggles: human being. We should, and will likely need to, combine our forces.

What else is new? Closest to the epicenter, is the need to reevaluate love and its associated emotions. I want to say more on this in a future article because it is where I find the book most liberating and hopeful. Then, of course, there is the need to reevaluate and reimagine social institutions suited to the “sexual exiles” we now know we are (to use a term coined by Stephen Snyder, featured in an earlier post). This is already an agenda of unimaginable breadth – but it does not stop there. As an economist (yes, I am in reality an economist), I find an enormous set of related challenges in the need to reassess the fundamental and highly useful simplifying assumptions of mainstream economics regarding so-called “rational” behavior. Of course, this is not an entirely new agenda; but it is lent a great deal new weight by these insights into a model of human nature quite at odds, at least within a defined sphere, with neoclassical assumptions. The use of the term “households” to define the basic unit of consumption was already a (reluctant and awkward) concession to the commonsense understanding that there existed individuals within the boundaries of the welfare-maximizing economic unit other than its (presumably) titular head, whose welfare was part of the objective function that this “head” would endeavor to maximize (we are not told with what discount factor). Now, I think, we know that we are capable of being cynical – but not wired for it. Whatever the exact form is that such “wiring” takes. (This is a matter I have frankly no understanding of – if anyone can enlighten me).

In fact it is difficult to conceive of any area of the social sciences which will not now have to question its basic assumptions – from anthropology to (even) psychoanalysis: how do Oedipus and Elektra complexes look once we redefine the family unit?. (A problem with the standard discourse of psychoanalysis which has always, of course, been quite a challenge to adequately theorize).

What Ryan and Jetha have achieved is what is correctly known as a paradigm shift. The course which human history is about to take has been set out by the seminal philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. It will not be easy and it may not be nice: but there is no turning back until, eventually, the fact of our polyamorous ancestry is as much a part of our mental universe as the theory of evolution itself.

It’s my hope, of course, that in the inevitable onslaughts which will follow, the fundamentally beautiful human insights which follow from the book’s findings will not be lost from view. This is no crude defence of marginal sexual lifestyles. We are all a part of it, and all estranged from our core natures by no fault of our own. This calls for courage and conviction, but also empathy and compassion. Something, it turns out, we as a species are actually quite capable of.

Tag: Kuhn

“Sex at Dawn” – a review