The Paradoxical Primate (Societas) [Paperback]

When the founder of sociobiolgy, E. O. Wilson, made a plea for greater integration of the physical and human sciences in his book Consilience, there was an underlying assumption that the traffic would be mainly one way -- from physical to human science. This book reverses this assumption and draws on a new branch of human sciences, paradoxical systems theory, to reconceptualise some of the most innovative developments from physical sciences -- the related fields of evolutionary psychology, ethology, and behavioural genetics. The new approach is also applied to politics, economic and public policy approaches.

This is a little book about a big subject — why humans are weird. We act in often apparently bizarre and inexplicable ways. Our behaviour seems sometimes to be utterly unpredictable at the individual level and almost as difficult to forecast at the group level. Human systems — such as stock markets, fashions and musical tastes — seem to change capriciously. This book suggests a not so novel hypothesis for how we are and a fairly novel hypothesis about how we got to be how we are.

The not so novel hypothesis is that people are paradoxical — that is they act in ways which are often contradictory, indeed self-contradictory. They can behave as war-mongers and peaceniks, avaricious thieves and altruistic Samaritans, cooperative bees and lone wolves, conformist teachers’ pets and rebels without a cause. Not just different people — the same people can do all these things.

This idea is not so novel because it has been around a long time in various religions — everything from Christianity seeing humans as part divine and part devilish through to Chinese Taoist ideas about yin and yang in human behaviour. Maybe the religions were on to something, even if they express it in mystical terms, because there is quite a lot of thoroughly modern and scientific literature which suggest that humans do indeed behave paradoxically — from organisation theory, economics and other sources (as we shall see later).

However, treating paradoxical behaviour (and its source in paradoxical instincts) as axiomatic about humans is taking this a step further than most writers have done so far. Most social scientists have retreated into one of two camps: either adopting a ‘blank slate’ view of the sources of human behaviour or rather one-sided views of heritable behaviour. What is proposed systematically in these pages is that human instincts and behaviour are permanently contradictory — which is what we mean by paradoxical. Understanding this paradoxical nature is fundamental to understanding our branch of life on earth.

We share some of these characteristics with some close relatives in the primate branch of life (and even a few other animal neighbours). This is hardly surprising as we are an evolved species and didn’t (contrary to what some people say) simply materialise out of thin air. The novel hypothesis is just that — humans have evolved paradoxical instincts. We are weird because we evolved that way. It is deeply buried in our evolutionary history and is therefore ineradicable.

This idea will certainly be attacked as another ‘just so story’ which seems, these days, to be an epithet readily applied to anyone else’s hypotheses that you don’t like. I am happy to admit this is a guess, a hypothesis or even a ‘just so’ story if you like. But as with all such ideas the only way to find out is to test them. First you have to actually read what evidence has been drawn upon, inferences made and conjectures conjected before you can understand where the idea comes from. Then you have to see if there’s contrary evidence which successfully rejects the idea or not. Then you can call it a ‘just so’ story if it doesn’t ‘stack up’.

The reason the ‘paradoxical primate’ hypothesis might cause a bit of a stir in certain circles is because it leads to some pretty obvious and for some unpalatable conclusions. All sorts of utopians have built ideological schemas not about ‘how the camel got its hump’ but about ‘how humans would behave if society were just so’ (although for some reason these are not considered ‘just so’ stories). Some of these ideas have even been tried out. Unfortunately they didn’t quite work out. The ‘paradoxical primate’ hypothesis suggests that such utopian schemes — if they run contrary to human contradictions — will never work out. I confidently predict this will not be seen as good news by various ideologues (of both left and right) — I do hope I am right.

So by now, if you are convinced that nurture rules, or that everyone is just a simple rational utility maximising machine, or you are just uncomfortable with illogical stuff like paradoxes you will have guessed this book is not for you. For those with more open minds (even some of the above) I hope it will convince you that there is something a bit more than a ‘just so’ story in these pages and it is worth exploring further. It also starts to make sense of an awful lot of stuff that we’ve had problems with for the past 5,000 years or so and many social scientists are still going quietly bonkers over (well, some of them anyway). But first, a little personal diversion (but it does tell you something, so bear with me).

This book — in part at least — recapitulates my own intellectual journey in trying to understand the peculiar beast we call ‘human’. My personal trajectory is not at all novel: — a radical Marxist in the 1970s (my 20s), mellowing to a progressive reformer in the 1980s and (I hope) a more reflective pragmatist in the 1990s. If I were to try and sum up my trajectory it would be roughly from materialist dialectician to materialist rationalist and now to materialist paradoxicalist. (I am not sure ‘paradoxi- calist’ is a word — but if it isn’t, it is now). Whilst I have lost some intellectual excess baggage and some comrades on this journey, fortunately not all I have acquired along the way has proved completely useless (I hope).

Even Marxism still has some useful things to say, however unfashionable that might seem in the post-communist, end of history, ‘Noughties’. Dialectics as an approach is very close to paradox — but it is not the same thing and has the unfortunate tendency, through the notion of synthesis, to assume inevitable progress or sometimes regress — ‘socialism or barbarism’ in Rosa Luxemburg’s famous phrase [snip] . . . .