The Folly of Fools (48 page)

Finally, when a science is a pretend science rather than the real thing, it also falls into sloppy and biased systems for evaluating the truth. Consider the following, a common occurrence during the past fifteen years. The World Bank advises developing countries to open their markets to foreign goods, let the markets rule, and slash the welfare state. When the program is implemented and fails, the diagnosis is simple: “Our advice was good but you failed to follow it closely enough.” There is little risk of being falsified with this kind of procedure.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Cultural anthropology made a tragic left turn in the mid-1970s from which it has yet to recover (at least in the United States). Before then, the field was called social anthropology and included all forms of human social behavior, especially as displayed by different cultures and peoples. The field was meant to partner with physical anthropology, the study of the body, including fossils and artifacts from the past. But suddenly in the early 1970s, strong social theory emerged from biology and a variety of subjects were addressed seriously for the first time: kinship theory, including parent/offspring relations, relative parental investment, and the evolution of sex differences, the sex ratio, reciprocal altruism and a sense of fairness, and so on. Social anthropologists had a choice: accept the new work, master it, and rewrite their own discipline along the new lines, or reject the new work and protect their own expertise (such as it was). As has been noted, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” This is perhaps especially true in academia.

Consider your dilemma as a social anthropologist. You have invested twenty years of your life in mastering social anthropology. Along the way, you have completely neglected biology. Now comes the choice: acknowledge biology (painful), invest three years in catching up (nearly unimaginable), then compete with people twenty years younger than you and better trained (impossible)—or instead ride the old horse for all she is worth, whipping social anthropology until she bleeds? Even in physics, it was famously said that the field advanced one funeral at a time—only death could get people to change their minds. But notice the intermediate path not taken. They could have said, “I will not retool myself; it is too late. But I will make sure my students learn something useful about the new work in biology (they can even teach me) while I continue to do my work.” Complete rejection is redolent of self-deception. Outright denial is the easiest immediate path but entrains mounting costs, now onto the third generation, making it ever harder to resist each new wave of denial.

Certainly the social anthropologists rose to the challenge, even renaming their field “cultural anthropology” to more explicitly rule out the relevance of biology in advance. Now we were no longer social organisms but cultural ones. The justification, in turn, was moral. Out of biological thinking flowed biological determinism (the notion that genetics influences daily life), whose downstream effects included fascism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other odious “isms.” To mention natural selection was to imply the existence and perhaps even utility of genes, which was prohibited on the moral grounds just given. Thus an entire new area of social theory would be ruled out based on the alleged pernicious influences of its assumptions, which were, in fact, widely accepted as true (genes exist, they affect social traits, natural selection alters their relative frequencies, and this produces meaningful patterns). Once you remove biology from human social life, what do you have? Words. Not even language, which of course is deeply biological, but words alone that then wield magical powers, capable of biasing your every thought, science itself reduced to one of many arbitrary systems of thought.

And what has been the upshot of this? Thirty-five wasted years and counting. Years wasted in not synthesizing social and physical anthropology. Strong people welcome new ideas and make them their own. Weak people run from new ideas, or so it seems, and then are driven into bizarre mind states, such as believing that words have the power to dominate reality, that social constructs such as gender are much stronger than the 300 million years of genetic evolution that went into producing the two sexes—whose facts in any case they remain resolutely ignorant of, the better to develop a thoroughly word-based approach to the subject.

In many ways, cultural anthropology is now all about self-deception—other people’s. Science itself is a social construct, one among many equally valid ways of viewing the world: the properties of viruses may also be social constructs, the penis may, in some meaningful sense, be the square root of–1, and so on. As a result, most US anthropology departments consist of two completely separate sections, in which, as one biological colleague put it, “they think we’re Nazis and we think they are idiots”—hardly a platform for synthesis and mutual growth.

PSYCHOLOGY

In the 1960s, psychologists often explicitly disavowed the importance of biology. At Harvard, to get a PhD in psychology, you were required to take one semester of physics. This was to give you an idea of what an exact science looked like. No biology was required. Like economists, psychologists were going to create their field out of itself: learning theory, social psychology, psychoanalysis—essentially competing guesses about what was important in human development, none with any foundation. Psychoanalysis was a long-running fraud, as we shall see below, and learning theory made far-reaching and implausible claims about the ability of reinforcement to mold all behavior adaptively. It was soon shown on logical grounds alone that reinforcement could not produce language, or even just associations of actions and their effects when the latter were delayed more than a few moments.

On the positive side, psychology has always concentrated on the individual and was thus congenial to an approach based on individual advantage. Recently a school of evolutionary psychology has developed, while psychology has been increasingly integrated with other areas of biology, sensory physiology long ago but now neurophysiology and immunology. So psychology is rapidly becoming the branch of evolutionary biology it always wished to be.

Social psychology somewhat lags the rest of psychology, another example perhaps of the retarding effects of deceit and self-deception on disciplines with more social content. It has generated artificial methodologies meant to shortcut work and achieve quick results, the curse of psychology for more than a century: wishing to say more than available knowledge permits. A key such method was that of self-reports, or questionnaire-answering behavior—what people say about themselves. In retrospect, it seems unwise to have tried to build a science of human behavior on people’s verbal responses to questions. For one thing, forces of deceit and self-deception—or call them issues of self-presentation and self-perception, if you prefer—loom large. We often do not tell the truth about ourselves to others and we often do not know the truth in the first place. In using these measures, exactly how were they screening out deception, never mind self-deception, to arrive at the truth? And how is this possible in the absence of an explicit theory of deceit and self-deception? Building a science on this foundation led to numerous significant correlations between ill-defined variables that are poorly measured, but little or no cumulative growth over time. Instruments (that is, questionnaires) were said to be well-validated, predictive, and internally consistent, that is, people answer the same way a month apart, the measures correlate with some other measures, and all questions point in the same direction (or are reverse scored). Not a very impressive nod toward methodology, but fortunately this era is coming to a close, with new methodologies that access unconcious biases directly.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: SELF-DECEPTION IN THE STUDY OF SELF-DECEPTION

Freud claimed to have developed a detailed science of self-deception and human development: psychoanalysis. But one measure of a field is whether it grows and prospers or wilts and withers, and psychoanalysis has not prospered. As it turned out, the empirical foundation for developments in the field was something called clinical lore, essentially what psychiatrists told one another over drinks after a day’s work. That is, when you asked a psychiatrist what his (as he almost always was) basis was for believing that a key part of the female psyche was “penis envy” or that the route to understanding males lay in something called castration anxiety, you were told that the basis was shared experiences, assumptions, and assertions among psychoanalysts about what went on during psychotherapy—something inaccessible to you, unverifiable, and, as a system, providing no hope for improvement. Indeed, the failure to state or develop methodologies capable of producing useful information is almost the definition of nonscience, and in this regard, psychoanalysis has been spectacularly successful. When is the last time you heard of a large, double-blind study of penis envy or castration anxiety?

Freud’s theory consisted of two parts: self-deception and psychosocial development. The theory of self-deception had many creative concepts—denial, projection, reaction formation, ego defense mechanism, and so on, but these were wedded to a larger system that made no sense at all, the id (instinctual forces heavily based on alleged critical transitions in early life—anal, oral, and oedipal), the ego (roughly, the conscious mind), and the superego (the conscience, or something like that, formed by interaction with parents and significant others).

His theory of psychosocial development was corrupt, in the sense that it was built on weak and suspect assumptions that had little or no factual support. The argument was heavily centered on sexual attraction within the nuclear family—and its suppression—but there is good reason to doubt that this should be a major offspring concern. Almost all species of animals are selected to avoid close inbreeding, which has real genetic costs, and they have evolved mechanisms—for example, early exposure to parents and siblings causes sexual disinterest—that minimize inbreeding. This is especially true from the offspring’s viewpoint. That is, fathers may gain in relatedness by forcing sex on a daughter (and therefore a child) sufficient to offset the genetic cost, but the daughter is unlikely to benefit sufficiently in relatedness to offset her cost. The son could in principle benefit from impregnating his mother, but selection would be weak at best, the one ending her reproduction while the other is beginning his, and there are other very good reasons for showing deference to one’s mother (especially for a male’s maternal genes).

Thus, with Freud’s claim that sexual tendencies in the family arose from the unconscious needs of the child, he was committing a classic case of denial and projection—denying the inappropriate sexual advances toward young women by their male relatives (as his women patients were describing to him) and imagining instead that the women were lusting after precisely these couplings.

He was also obtuse to harsh parental treatment as a cause of offspring malfunction. Once again, his tendency was to blame the victim. One of Freud’s celebrated analyses was that of “Wolf Man,” psychotic since adulthood with sensations of being tormented physically, bound and restricted, and unable to control his fears. Freud conjured this whole syndrome as resulting from the child’s failure to mature properly, getting stuck in some early stage of development, but he never considered the father’s possible role in this—indeed speaks warmly of him as a highly regarded educator with numerous books—even though he was a sadistic educator and parent. He advocated tying children into bed at night and using a series of other torture devices, all in the name of good posture. Alas, he applied his theories to his own children. One boy committed suicide; the other survived to become Freud’s “Wolf Man.”

The degree to which Freud’s habit of cocaine abuse during his early years helped fuel his grandiosity is impossible to know, but he certainly easily believed in other phantasmagorical things, for example, that the number twenty-nine played a recurring and decisive role in human life, or that thought could be transported instantaneously across wide distances without the use of electrical devices, and so on. What is truly extraordinary is that he was able to build a cult that took over whole sections of psychiatry and psychology, and provided employment for generations of like-minded people, charging high fees, four times a week, to misinterpret the lives of those they were talking to.

Freud’s own attitude toward empirical verification was nicely summarized when he responded to someone asking if after thirty years of theorizing, perhaps it was time for some experimental testing. Though allowing that experiments could do no harm, Freud said:

The wealth of dependable observations on which these assertions rest, make them independent of experimental verification.

This is an unusual assertion, since it suggests that counterevidence cannot count as actual evidence. Put differently, the worlds of experimental truth and psychoanalytic truth are independent, as indeed they are. Contrast the position of the famous physicist Richard Feynman:

It doesn’t matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, the guess is wrong. That’s all there is to it.

SELF-DECEPTION DEFORMS DISCIPLINES

We have seen numerous ways in which self-deception may deform the structure of intellectual disciplines. This seems obvious in both evolutionary biology and the social sciences, where increasing relevance to human social behavior is matched by decreasing rates of progress, in part because such fields induce more self-deception in their practitioners. One common bias is that life naturally evolves to subserve function at higher levels. Not genes but individuals, not individuals but groups, not groups but species, not species but ecosystems, and, with a little extra energy, not ecosystems but the entire universe. Certainly religion seems to promote this pattern, always tempted to see a larger pattern than is warranted. Science provides some hope, since it has a built-in series of mechanisms that guard against deceit and self-deception, but it too is vulnerable to the construction of pseudo-sciences (Freud), not to mention outright fraud. Over the long haul, however, falsehood has no chance, which is why over time science tends to outstrip competing enterprises.