How Beastlv Our Beatitudes?

bery that sees only money-grubbing com- merce in America. To the contrary, he saw a positive, enterprising spirit with the potential to apply America's wealth to the task of edu- cating America's taste.

Anyone familiar with Starr's superb

Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the

Soviet Union (1985) may expect Bamboula! to extend the earlier book's the- sis that a commercial culture provides a healthy environment for the arts. Red and Hot illustrates the difference between the deadly "people's cultures" designed for the masses by their totalitarian masters and the rich popular culture that developed in the more-or-less free marketplace of America, giving rise to jazz among other musical glo- ries.

Yet Starr's sympathy for commerce re- mains strangely muted in Bamboula!, possi-bly out of reluctance to pass final judgment on Gottschalk the composer. Unfortunately, this reluctance means that Starr stops short of assessing Gottschalk's proper place in the history of Western music. But Starr does make it clear that even if the greatest strength of Gottschalk's music was a rhyth- mic force lost with live performance, his place should not be forgotten. Indeed, now that young musicians routinely gain fluency in both the European and the Afro-Ameri- can idioms, a swinging revival of Gott- schalk's music may be in store. Beyond that possibility, the life of this forgotten eccen- tric, this failed aesthete, sheds real light on how the music and culture of the last cen- tury gave rise to the perplexities of our own.

-Martha Bayles, formerly the television and arts critic for the Wall Street Jour- nal, is the author of Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (1994).

How Beastlv Our Beatitudes? ---------------------------

THE MORAL ANIMAL: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. By Robert Wright. Pantheon. 467 pp. $27.50 THE HUNGRY SOUL: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. By Leon Kass. Free Press. 248 pp. $24.95

'hat can the study of nature, and, above all, of human nature, teach us about how we ought to live? According to both Robert Wright and Leon Kass, the answer is clear: a great deal. Such an answer marks a valuable turning away from the dominant assumptions of an age that, believing in the moral silence of an in- different nature and the moral neutrality of objective science, sees human nature as nearly infinitely malleable and solely shaped by social forces. Both Wright and

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Kass are convinced that such a mistaken view of human nature, fostered by our so- cial and natural sciences, is in part respon- sible for the moral confusions from which we suffer today. By their willingness to ex- amine human nature, both authors return us to the originating Socratic question of our philosophical tradition.

Yet, beyond that common purpose, Wright and Kass can agree on very little because they look for human nature in op- posite directions. Wright, gazing backward at our evolutionary past, constructs just-so stories of how our natural tendencies may have come into being; Kass, "taking human nature as we find it,' explores its current meaning and its possible improvement through custom and culture. Which ap- proach, then, is the correct one? Which ac- count is more illuminating and compelling?

In The Moral Animal, Wright, a senior edi- tor of the New Republic and a highly respected science writer, seeks to popularize the new science of "evolutionary psychology." This science, as he explains, is the study of human mental and moral traits as evolved devices for the maximization of genetic fitness. To Wright, evolutionary psychology constitutes a breakthrough in our scientific understand- ing of human nature. Its practitioners have discovered that we are really machines en- dowed with a common set of emotional "knobs" (love, guilt, hatred, empathy, etc.), the "exact tunings" of which are determined "by a generic, species-wide developmental program that absorbs information from the social environment and adjusts the maturing mind accordingly." The underlying bio-logic of these knobs and tunings is to pass on as many copies of our genes as possible to sub- sequent generations by flooding our psyches with feelings, impulses, and judgments that will motivate us to act as natural selection 'wants" us to act.

Wright believes this perspective has pro- found implications for our moral and politi- cal lives. "Can a Darwinian understanding of human nature help people reach their goals in life?" he asks. Can it help us choose properly from among our many impulses and goals, distinguishing the practical from the imprac- tical, the legitimate from the illegitimate, and the worthy from the unworthy? "The an- swers,' Wright boldly asserts, are "yes, yes, yes, and finally yes."

Wright's aims, however, go well beyond information and instruction. This book is, as he puts it, "a sales pitch for a new science . . . [and] for a new basis of political and moral philosophy." Such candor is wel- come, but, as with any "sales pitch," readers should be wary of false promises and flashy packaging that conceal the same old contents. If we strip away the label of "evolutionary psychology" in The Moral Animal, we find "so- ciobiology" printed underneath. The name has been changed for marketing purposes because, as Wright notes, the harsh criticisms of sociobiology's flaws had made the word too "tainted for use. In some respects, The Moral Animal is an updated version of E. 0. Wilson's On Human Nature (1979) and Rich- ard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976), com- plete with their reductionism, exaggerated de- terminism, and moral confusion.

For Wright, as for his predecessors, "ev- erything that matters" about us, both high and low, is just a "device" designed by our "cre- ator'-that "ingenious craftsman," natural selection. Romance and rape, honesty and deception, humility and social climbing are all part of our genetically constructed psycho- logical repertoire that we employ as circum- stances demand to enhance our genetic fit- ness. Sympathy for others is an "investment" aimed at long-term genetic returns; the grief of parents over the death of an adolescent child is just regret over lost "assets." Adultery is no vice and fidelity no virtue but simply the appropriate sexual strategies for different cir- cumstances. Even the teachings of Jesus, Bud- dha, and Lao-tzu are merely ideologies serv- ing their own personal social status and hence genetic interests.

wright knows no bounds in his unmaskings, except for his own efforts, of course. But what follows from such a perspective? What of the behav- ioral insights and moral guidance Wright has promised? While Wright does succeed in demonstrating the fallacy of equating a Dar- winian perspective with conservative politics, the implications and insights he offers tend to be either trivial or contradictory. Do we really need evolutionary psychology to tell us that human beings are often selfish and hypocriti- cal and that our moral sense is often self-serv- ing, or to learn that women in poor comrnu- nities are more amenable to sex without com- mitment? If his analysis of Darwin's person- ality, which is presented as a "test of the ex- planatory power" of the new doctrine, culrni- nates in the "verdict" that "he was a product of his environment," what have we gained?

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Wright's attempts at moral guidance are even more problematic, not because they are unworthy but because his moral preferences, however admirable, are at odds with the theory that is supposed to sanction them. He fills hundreds of pages describing human be- ings as "robots," "puppets," "machines," and "Swiss watches" programmed by natural se- lection-a natural selection that he manages to endow with all the qualities of ingenuity, reason, and creativity that he denies to human beings. How then can he argue that "there is no reason to derive our values from natural selection's 'values' "because we are now free to choose our moral ideals? If "biochemistry governs all," how can we reflect on this "fact" and its underlying "value" (genetic fitness) and reject them both? Where do these non- evolutionary values come from and how are we to choose them if free will, as Wright tells us repeatedly, is sheer illusion, an illusion we can choose to abandon?

Wright recognizes that evolutionary psychology's unmasking of all thoughts and feelings as genetically programmed "invest- ment strategies" may have a corrosive effect on our moral principles and social order through the cynicism, relativism, and de- spair that it seems to nourish. To escape such a prospect, he proposes a return to 19th-century utilitarianism as a natural moral ground upon which our lives are to be reconstructed. Leaving aside the prob- lems with utilitarianism as a moral philoso- phy, how can Wright argue that Darwinism leads us in the direction of a non-hypocriti- cal "brotherly love" and "boundless empa- thy' which truly recognizes that "every- one's happiness counts equally," when he has already told us that Darwinism un- masks such feelings as mere devices "switched on and off in keeping with self- interest"? If natural selection is "a creative process devoted to selfishness" and has "programmed" us accordingly, why wouldn't our understanding of this "fact" lead us to honest and self-conscious genetic selfishness instead? In short, Wright's utili-

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tarianism requires a leap of faith, the very possibility of which his own theory denies. Faced with such contradictions, many read- ers will, I fear, find more grounds for ratio- nalizing their moral failings and brutal in- terests than for their "love of humanity."

Kass's Hungry Soul is a powerful an- tidote to works such as Wright's that attempt to reduce living beings to mere machines. Kass may not have any breakthroughs to sell, but he has crafted a splendid and thoughtful essay. Through an examination of human eating, he sheds valuable light on the distinctiveness of hu- man nature and how it is to be nurtured and perfected.

To Kass, a medical doctor by training, reductive accounts of our nature are "un- natural" because they ignore the reality of our lived experience. They are also "ethically subversive" because they discredit the moral sentiments, aspirations, and teach- ings by which we have attempted to guide our lives. Kass's "more natural science" aims at recapturing that lived experience, both our own and that preserved in "our accumulated moral and cultural wisdom."

Kass presents a fascinating account of human eating and the various taboos, cus- toms, manners, and rituals surrounding it, to show what these reveal about ourselves. Even the eating behavior of animals re- quires that they possess the ability to recog- nize and respond to inner needs, sense the outer presence of what is needed, and act to incorporate it. In simple organisms such as bacteria, these powers may be experienced " 'automatically,' without deliberation or conscious intention." But in complex organ- isms, such as mammals, the "nascent self becomes more fully developed as the organ- ism gathers and processes more information and coordinates more complex actions to satisfy its needs. In humans, consciously felt need and consciously directed actions gen- erate a "realm of freedom" from automatic control by instinct or biochemistry, a "free- dom" which is qualitatively different from other animals' experience.

Transformed into "hunger" and "crav- ing," our metabolic needs stimulate both imagination and reason, which enable us to pursue satisfactions that may range far be- yond physiological need, even to the point of harming our health. We come to eat for pleasure and not simply for nutrition and find pleasure in meals as diverse as an At- lantic City buffet or the Japanese delicacy of pufferfish, whose lethal poison, tetradotox- in, rewards thrill-seeking gourmets with ei- ther euphoria or death.

But just as these "pleasures of the pal- ate can be pursued as ends in themselves," so too may the other pleasures of the table that accompany them-conversation, fel-lowship, and refinement-which may ulti- mately become the real focus of the meal. Every step along the complex path by which our species satisfies its nutritional need, from planting crops to the preparation of food, requires faculties and pleasures of mind that can be applied beyond, and even against, the demands of our stomachs to satisfy our yearnings for understanding and meaning. With reason and imagination we can thus track down and capture an animal larger and swifter than ourselves and then worship rather than roast it.

Here, in the play of manners and cuisine; we see the ultimate inad- equacy of reductive evolutionary accounts of our nature that explain diver- gence from adaptive value as a "malfunc- tion." Wright acknowledges this inad-equacy in the appendix to his book when he tries to explain the development of human homosexuality, a pattern of sexual behavior that defies evolutionary logic. Homosexual behavior points instead, Wright says, to "the malleability of the human mind and a "general principle" of life: "Once natural selection has created a form of gratifica- tion-genital stimulation, in this case-that form can come to serve other functions." Wright's intellectual honesty here is laud- able, but by acknowledging the freedom and openness of human possibility, he is contradicting the argument of his work.

For Kass, it is precisely this potential freedom "to serve other functions" that constitutes our distinctive nature as a "moral animal" because of the possi- bilities for virtue and perversion that it opens up. How then to choose from the vast range of the possible-and choose we must-that which is better, while avoid- ing that which is worse? Kass proposes that our understanding of nature can serve as a "suggestive teacher." Those customs, laws, and beliefs-such as the ones surrounding civilized dining-that restrain the purely animal while cultivat- ing the distinctively human qualities of in- tellect, self-command, civility, and rever- ence are "truer" and "better" than those that fail to do so.

As a guide to our inescapably moral lives, this image of human nature-human nature in the Aristotelian sense of what we can grow into, rather than what we have grown out of-may be imperfect. We may certainly disagree about which customs, laws, and beliefs best cultivate that distinc- tive human nature, but Kass has succeeded brilliantly in reminding us of who we really are so that we may endeavor to act ac- cordingly. At a minimum, Kassfs re- minder enables us to reject images of our nature, such as those celebrated in evolu- tionary psychology, that are neither true nor good. In an age when such false im- ages encourage our embrace of genetic re- programming and biochemical manipula- tion, this in itself is a remarkable and valu- able achievement.

-Howard Kaye is a professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College and the author of The Social Meaning of Mod- ern Biology, from Social Darwinism to Sociobiology (1986).

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