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Evolutionary Psychology
The New Evolutionary Socialism
How A Darwinian Approach Can Help Level the Playing Field
Posted November 22, 2016
One great thing about life is that you pretty much never stop learning. During this past election season, I learned a lot about myself. One thing I learned is this: I guess I’m a socialist at heart. I’d never quite given this issue much thought. But then I started listening to Bernie Sanders. And wow, did I find myself agreeing with nearly everything that guy has to say! He wants to redistribute the wealth in this country. He wants to provide free access to high-caliber education to all citizens. He wants to make this a nation where every person, regardless of background, is given the same attention and support as every other citizen. I realize that there are other models of structuring society out there - and I’m fine with there being a plurality of perspectives on all this - but hey, I think I’m a total socialist at heart - and the recent zoo of an election season showed me this about myself.
One might think: How can this guy be both a staunch advocate of evolution and a socialist at the same time? Aren’t these incongruous ideas? Isn’t evolution a red-in-tooth-and-claw approach to life at all levels? Isn’t it all “survival of the fittest” with the “weak ones dying out?” Well if that’s what you think, then I’ve got news for you: You’re not keeping up with the current work in the field of evolutionary psychology! And you might want to pick up my book on the topic, Evolutionary Psychology 101.
There is some change that’s brewing in evolutionary circles. I call the new movement in the field of evolutionary psychology Positive Evolutionary Psychology (See Geher & Wedberg, in contract). This idea pertains to the large-scale movement by many current evolutionary psychologists to conduct evolutionarily informed research to help elucidate issues related to positive psychology which focuses on better understanding the positive aspects of the human experience, such as factors that lead to increases in satisfaction with one’s life or factors that are associated with building prosocial communities (see Wilkins, 2014).
To my understanding, evolutionary psychology may well be the most powerful and applicable approach to understanding phenomena that cuts across all domains of human behavior (see Carmen et al., 2013). Using this area of basic research to help elucidate the positive aspects of the human experience just seems like an idea whose time has come.
The Dark Shadow of Social Darwinism
The idea of applying Darwin’s principles to human societies has a long and not-fully-pleasant history. Perhaps the darkest mark in recent history that connects Darwinism with a social engineering agenda is found in Hitler’s fascism in 20th-century Europe. While modern scholars on the history of Darwin paint him as anything but a racist (see Desmond & Moore, 2014), Darwin’s ideas have famously been misconstrued and applied to justify such abhorrent acts as eugenics and concomitant genocides (although renowned historian Robert Richards takes issue with this linkage in his recent analyses of Fascism https://evolution-institute.org/article/was-hitler-a-darwinian/). In any case, efforts to justify social practices that under-benefit members of certain groups due to race or ethnicity - and to over-benefit members of other groups, also due to race and ethnicity, have taken place and, as history tells us, such efforts have led to some of the most divisive and colossal failures of our humanity that have ever taken place.
For these reasons, the term “social Darwinism” has become a bit tainted. And it may be hard to reclaim.
Evolutionary Socialism: Early Roots
The term “evolutionary socialism” is different than “social Darwinism” in a few ways. First, this term is not very frequently used! A google search of “social Darwinism” today turns up 504,000 hits while a google search of “evolutionary socialism” today turns up 20,400. Evolutionary socialism is largely associated with the early 20th century German intellectual Eduard Bernstein, a scholar who traveled in the same circles with Karl Marx. Like Marx, his work focused on advancing a socialist agenda (Tudor & Tudor, 1988). His idea of “evolutionary socialism” was connected with “evolution” in a “social-evolution” kind of way. He supported the advocacy of socialism and felt that through large-scale advocacy and key victory in elections, a society could evolve toward a socialist structure without the need for a revolution. So this was “evolutionary” in a sense, to be sure. But it’s not what I have in mind when I think of “evolutionary socialism.”
The Egalitarian Ape and Modern Evolutionary Socialism
As I see it, a new Evolutionary Socialism can easily be carved out of Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza’s (2009) groundbreaking ideas on the evolutionary origins of human societies. In a fantastic integration of biological, psychological, historical, anthropological, political, and economic data, Bingham and Souza argue that a foundational feature of being human pertains to our ability to accurately throw rocks in a coordinated fashion. While this almost sounds silly at first, upon further inspection, it’s actually quite awesome. You see, no other primates are capable of throwing projectiles quickly or accurately. But if you’ve ever seen a pitcher in a major league baseball game, you know that humans are, in fact, highly capable of doing this. What’s more, think about throwing rocks as a weapon against another. According to Bingham and Souza (2009), when humans developed the ability to accurately throw rocks in this way, they were capable of inflicting large costs to others at a very small cost to themselves. In close-combat fighting, you can get hurt really badly. But if you throw a rock at another who is far away, you are capable of hurting that other without being hurt (immediately) back. This capacity for remote killing may have been the first-ever such time in evolutionary history that members of any species were capable of intentionally exerting physical costs on another from a distance.
Couple this remote-killing ability with another aspect of human behavior - hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans started to form groups - coalitions that extended beyond kin lines. This is, to the minds of many key evolutionists (see Wilson, 2007), a critical element of what makes humans unique. But Bingham and Souza (2009) up the ante. Think about it this way: When humans were able to both (a) throw rocks accurately and (b) form coalitions beyond kin lines, they were able to get together and form powerful groups that could exert influence over powerful, autocratic leaders. In essence, with the advent of these two basic features of what it means to be human, the playing field became leveled. Little guys who had zero capacity for dominance and leadership suddenly had a route to power. They could band together with a group of other little guys who could, in combination, have a powerful claim in the broader society.
So this may well be how egalitarianism and democracy evolved. From this perspective, then, humans actually evolved for democratic social structures. We evolved to have power distributed among the many. We evolved, in effect, for socialism!
But, of course, there is a catch. Any and all systems are exploitable. As history advanced, new kinds of projectile weapons were invented. Spears were better than rocks. So those with the spears exerted influence. Guns were better than spears, so those with guns disproportionately exerted influence. Etc.
From the perspective of Bingham and Souza, then, there are two basic modes of human social operations. One is the egalitarian mode - when power is distributed equally among the many. But depending on who all has access to which resources at a time, a society could easily find itself in an autocratic mode, with a small subset of individuals who disproportionately hold resources exerting a disproportionate amount of the power. (follow this link for a terrific video on these ideas).
From this vantage point, then, a basic application of Bingham and Souza’s ideas to any society is to make sure that resources are evenly divided and accessible across all individuals. Such an outcome better matches our natural human proclivities and it leads to the greatest outcomes, on average, for the greatest number of citizens. This, to my mind, is the face of evolutionary socialism.
Bottom Line
Applying Darwin’s ideas to human social issues has had mixed results in the past. This said, Darwin’s ideas are, perhaps, the most progressive scientific ideas there are when it comes to understanding what it means to be human. The new evolutionary socialism, described here, uses Bingham and Souza’s (2009) work, founded in a Darwinian approach, to help us understand where egalitarianism fits in with our evolved nature. A true socialist approach to society, one that focuses on evenly distributing resources, is actually quite consistent with a basic mode of our evolved social functioning. Can you be a Darwinist and a socialist at the same time? Yes indeed!
References
Bingham, P. M., & Souza, J. (2009). Death from a distance and the birth of a humane universe. Lexington, KY: BookSurge Publishing.
Carmen, R. A., Geher, G., Glass, D. J., Guitar, A. E., Grandis, T. L., Johnsen, L.,Philip, M. M., Newmark, R. L., Trouton, G. T., & Tauber, B. R. (2013). Evolution integrated across all islands of the human behavioral archipelago: All psychology as Evolutionary Psychology. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 5(1), 108-126.
Desmond, A., & Moore, (2014). Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. New York:: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Geher, G. (2014). Evolutionary Psychology 101. New York: Springer.
Geher, G., & Wedberg, N. A. (in contract). Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin’s Guide to Living a Richer Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Richards, R. (2015). Was Hitler a Darwinian? No! No! No! https://evolution-institute.org/article/was-hitler-a-darwinian/
Tudor, Henry Tudor and J. M. Tudor, eds. Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896–1898, Cambridge University Press, 1988
Wilkins, P. (2014); Positive Psychology 101. New York: Springer.
Wilson, D. S. (2007). Evolution for everyone. New York: Delacorte Press.
