Taboo Issues in Social Science

Questioning Conventional Wisdom

Anthony Walsh

• Publisher: Vernon Art and Science Inc.
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781622733163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Teoría social

This book is an expedition into a number of controversial issues in the social sciences with the intention of challenging the conventional wisdom on those issues. While most social science research is interesting and important, a fair amount of social science research is thinly disguised advocacy research in which conclusions too often precede inquiries. The primary topics are those that the journal Nature described as "Taboo". In order of the degree of censure, the topics are: race, sex differences, intelligence, and violence. The only way to examine these topics with the social science seal of approval attached is through a strictly environmental lens. To bring biological factors to bear on them is politically incorrect and can bring the wrath of the academy down on one’s head. Although many researchers successfully bring biology into their research on these issues, they are said to risk career and reputation for doing so. Speech codes stifling free intellectual exchange pervade the ivory tower, and an overwhelmingly liberal faculty hell-bent on eliminating any vestiges of opposition to their ideology. This is unconscionable in an institution that is supposed to value free exchange of all ideas and opinions.
The current state of academic social science is examined before entering the substantive realm to try to explore how the topics I explore have become protected from any claims of "naturalness." Because the left rejects the idea of human nature, it insists that these things are products of social learning and/or social construction and are entirely fluid. To maintain this position in light of the huge and exponential successes of the natural sciences, the left embraces such frames of reasoning as postmodernism, radical relativism, multiculturalism, and political correctness, all of which are examined in this book. Also discussed are human nature, whiteness studies, political temperaments, various criminal justice issues, and capitalism versus socialism.

Ideological Battles over
Human Nature

Human Nature versus the Blank Slate

The way humans reflect about themselves as a species provides a guide for the way they reflect upon the rest of the world. Given the rift between liberal progressives and conservatives on so many things it is not surprising that sparks fly between them on the issue of human nature. Their different views of human nature illuminate many facets of the squabbles they get into about just about everything. Far-left liberals disparage the idea of a human nature, and because of this it is said that “Liberalism becomes a mask for arbitrary power.”¹ Steven Pinker argues that the left’s refusal to acknowledge human nature prompts them to follow Alice down the rabbit hole to the postmodernist Wonderland full of cockeyed theories and practices.

The refusal to acknowledge human nature …distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse, and our day-to-day lives. Logicians tell us that a single contradiction can corrupt a set of statements and allow falsehoods to proliferate hrough it. The dogma that human nature does not exist, in the face of evidence from science and common sense that it does, is just such a corrupting influence.²

The radical left rejects human nature because any hint that humans have innate dispositions undermines the dream that social institutions may be shaped in any direction by "arbitrary power." An innate human nature militates against such visions, and this is why the denial is led by leftist radicals with blank slate views of human nature. Although human nature is a nuisance for leftist, all theories of human conduct necessarily contain a vision of it. The leftist mantra “'Man has no nature, he only has a history" suggests that humans are blank slates at birth and human nature is something that becomes rather than something that is. Viewed as a continuum from complete fixity to complete malleability, humans are far closer to the blank slate end, but in its extreme form blank slate doctrine is dangerous. It is a totalitarian's dream, because if we are blank slates we can be conditioned to accept anything the state dictates. Tyrannical leaders who embraced the blank slate view such as Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot, murdered over 100 million people in their belief that they could take blank organisms and turn them into the "new Soviet, Chinese, or Cambodian man."³

While the blank slate view is primarily a left-wing philosophy, there are many exceptions to the rule. Noam Chomsky, for instance, is a strong leftist, but he warned of the dangers of accepting the blank slate view back in 1973:

If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the shaping of behavior by the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.⁴

Chomsky recognizes the reality of human nature because, unlike the great majority of social scientists, he is familiar with evolutionary biology and genetics. While more conservative scientists view each person as a unique individual, they realize that each is born with a suite of genes forged by evolution that is common for all humans. This vision is both more scientifically defensible and more respectful of human dignity than the blank slate view that delights political megalomaniacs demanding conformity to their dogma.

Liberal and Conservative Visions and Human Agency

The terms conservative and liberal can be ambiguous because who fits into them varies across historical and cultural contexts. At bottom, conservativism is about conserving and liberalism is about openness to change. Efforts to build a free market and democracy in Russia in the 1990s were resisted by conservatives who wanted to conserve socialism, but socialism in the United States is certainly not a conservative position. Classical liberals supported the free market and limited government, but this is a conservative position today. Thus, as the sociopolitical landscape changes, a conservative becomes a liberal and a liberal becomes a conservative, all without actually changing their ideological spots.

Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained” and “constrained” visions are more historically and culturally neutral terms for examining these ideological spots. Sowell alleges that these two visions have shaped divergent human thought about the same things throughout recorded history. While strict divisions are suspect, and certainly there are hybrids, one or the other seems to fit the majority of us most of the time. The constrained vision tracks the conservative’s view that human activities are constrained by a self-serving human nature. The unconstrained vision tracks the modern liberal view that human nature is a blank slate and is perfectible. Constrained visionaries say: "This is how the world is," and unconstrained visionaries say, "This is how the world should be." Gut level emotional instincts form how these visions intrude into our thinking more than cold rationality: "It is what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory, much less deduced any specific consequences as hypotheses to be tested against evidence." ⁵

One sentence of Sowell’s sums up the contrast between the two visions: "While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society."⁶ Unconstrained visionaries see war, poverty, and crime as abnormalities; constrained visionaries see them as regrettable but historically normal phenomena that will inevitably occur if nothing is done to prevent them. If the police disappear or are not supported in City Hall; I guarantee you will see crime rates go through the roof (think Baltimore in 2015). Do nothing but sit and dream all your life, and I guarantee you'll experience the bitter taste of poverty. I cannot guarantee a law-abiding city or how you can become wealthy, and neither can anyone else. Something has to be done to avoid war, crime, and poverty; doing nothing assures they will become realities.

Unconstrained visionaries are guided by abstract theories and believe that solutions to all problems are possible given sufficient commitment and funding. Because people are inherently good and highly malleable, war can be eliminated by rational discourse and disarmament; poverty by eliminating discrimination and capitalism, and crime by rehabilitation and social equality. Constrained visionaries are suspicious of abstract theories, and see that "solutions" are really trade-offs that often cause other problems. Because they see humans as self-seeking, would-be aggressors must be deterred by muscular shows of strength because nations have always sought their interests at the expense of others. Crime is motivated by self-interest too; people rob banks because, as the famous depression-era robber Willie Sutton said, "That's where the money is." It is prevented by the threat of punishment and by hardening potential targets to make crime more difficult to commit. Poverty is prevented by instilling in people a sense of personal responsibility, strengthening the family, and letting the free market work its magic.

It is perhaps their focus on society as the source of all evil that leads unconstrained visionaries to deny human nature rather than a willful denial of evidence. If human...

Table of contents

• Fox, 1991