Date: Sat, 1 Aug 1998 16:58:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Wayne Austin To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK Subject: Re: sociobiology and right-wing politics List, Put aside the fact of all the open racialists who make up the hard core of sociobiology for a moment, and let's consider those sociobiologists who have been alleged to have progressive political backgrounds. What does that tell us? The intent here is to use the good intentions fallacy to counter the undesirable political-ideological institutional basis of sociobiology. But a person can stand before me telling me that s/he is a social democrat all the while advancing a deeply reactionary ideological position. There's no contradiction. (And since when has social democracy become automatically defined as real progressivism?) What is far more important than the personal political views of individual sociobiologists, and I already raised this issue, is the actual political-ideological character of sociobiology. This notion of a communist conspiracy behind sociobiology because some of its proponents are "left-of-center liberals" and "social democrats," besides the sheer level of absurdity of its content, suffers from the error of confusing personal political allegiances with an ideological structure. Keeping in mind that ideological structures themselves have consequences relatively independent of any impoverished self-criticism of their advocates, we should know that it makes no more sense to say that sociobiology is not reactionary because some of its advocates are social democrats than it is sensible to say that anti-affirmative action is not racist because some of its advocates deny their hatred for blacks. The propaganda technique being deployed is the lesser known method of ad hominem that involves appealing to the desirable characteristics of the proponents of a particular position. The argument goes like this: "Noam Chomsky is a left-wing progressive; he believes in sociobiology; therefore sociobiology cannot be a reactionary right-wing ideology." First, I emphasize the distinction between this fallacious form of argument from the argument I have advanced that associates sociobiology, *as a political-ideological program*, with right-wing reactionary elements. My critique involves locating sociobiology in the institutional structures that fund it foster its development, and to do it is, in part, important to identify its proponents within those structures. (Nobody can credibly advance an argument that sociobiology is a left-wing political program.) Because sociobiology presents facts in the court of scientific discourse, its funding sources and political-ideological impetus is entirely relevant to the judgment of sociobiology as an intellectual endeavor. It is, personal political allegiances of the individual proponents to one side, a scientistic cover over a larger and long-time historical political program. Second, the understanding and controversy of Chomsky's position on this matter is more subtle than the sloganeering of the post I respond to permits. This is what happens when a speaker seeks to make a point-to-point reduction of somebody's political description and a larger political-ideological program. Chomsky's theory of the language acquisition device, as I have discussed previously on this listserv, is logically problematic, but in any case is the only compelling example of an intrinsic human nature. Chomsky's argument is not empirical, but rather structural, talking a realist position on linguistic capacity. However, it must be said that Chomsky extends his rationalism into many areas of human social life without any evidence whatsoever, and does so in my view irresponsibly. He has suggested that this genetic unfolding of innate rationality bears not only only aspects of intelligence, but also bears on moral and even aesthetic judgments. My take on Chomsky in this regard is that he developed the innate rationality of humans, along with their inherent creativity and need for free and creative work, and so on, and hooked this up with his value system as a matter of political expediency. His hostility to historical materialism leaves Chomsky with no scientific theory of human interaction, and so the rough leap of faith he had to make to accomplish his political program is expected. Chomsky should be criticized for this; this is probably the single biggest error Chomsky has ever made in his social philosophizing. We should keep in mind Chomsky's shifting position on this. He started off his career saying he could find only "tenuous points of contact" between his political position (anarchism) and the science he was developing. By the 1970s and 1980s he was advancing a limited form of sociobiology, a sort of Cartesian rationalist position. Yet, as the political agenda of the New Right has emerged more clearly, Chomsky has reacted strongly to the sociobiological program, condemning, for example, Murray's work, which is representative of the body of sociobiological literature. I am not at all sure that Chomsky today could be characterized as a sociobiology. Andy