In Search of Human Nature. The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Carl N. Degler)

CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEWS

written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 4.1 minutes
 
Some of the culture war conflicts go by different names but they are about the same thing at the underlying core: What is the cause of human nature?

Environment—or culture or life experiences—is the answer for Marxism, hence Communism, and today’s cultural Marxism movements. According to these theories, human nature is highly malleable. The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Environment—in the form of oppression—deforms human character and suffocated the success one can achieve personally and economically. In Marxism, capitalism is the oppressor which destroys workers’ characters and robs them of their full potential as creative, utopian beings. In critical race theory and Black Lives Matter, racism is the oppressor; race is considered a social construct for which there is no biological basis. In queer theory and transgender advocacy, a heterosexual norm is the oppressor; gender is not a biological reality.

​Biology—or genes or heredity—is the answer for much of conservative thinking. Races are real entities wherein the differences driven by biology can extend beyond superficial skin color. Sex is determined by genes at conception. The belief in a fixed conception of human nature is captured in the Declaration of Independence which begins by famously proclaiming that humans have inalienable, i.e., unchanging, rights.
 
Book Summary
Carl Degler’s 1991 book, In Search of Human Nature. The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, has a simple premise: Trace the history of the debate about the cause of human nature—culture versus biology, nurture versus nature—in terms of how the pendulum of consensus in the social sciences has swung back and forth. The shifts of the consensus revealed that the goal for many social scientists who advocated for environment was never to arrive at true facts. The goal was to arrive at the most useful beliefs.
The first part of the book begins in the mid-nineteenth century when biology was thought to play a strong role in determining human nature. Most people still lived close to the land, were intimately familiar with other species on farms, and witnessed their frequent breeding cycles. Mendel’s discoveries in genetic inheritance were not yet widely known, but the gist of inheritance of characteristics from parent to progeny seemed obvious. The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 set a huge piece of the intellectual framework confirming a role for biology.
But a countervailing framework of environment ascended in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as new professions of social science arose. Anthropology, sociology, and psychology provided professional homes for self-selected individuals who, driven by ideological commitments to equality, and passions to better the human race, ejected the role of biology because it didn’t fit with a fast agenda to topple oppressors, lift up the oppressed, and change the world. By 1915, biology had been almost totally discredited by these academics.
 
The second part of the book explained how a revival of biological explanations began in the late 1940s and continued to a point in 1975 when a book like Sociobiology, by E.O. Wilson could be published. This happened due in parts to renewed recognition of Darwinism, new discoveries in genes, new knowledge about animal behavior (e.g., Jane Goodall and chimpanzees; Konrad Lorenz and imprinting), and tests of intelligence in massive samples.
 
I’ve left out huge chunks of the book on fascinating topics, such as social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, and the roles of many famous scientists such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner, and the contributions of dozens of lesser knowns.
 
Degler didn’t take a clear stand on which cause he believed. He did, however, prominently note the ideological motivations of those who advocated for environment. They came in with ideology predetermined and then created the facts for it. He also noted how environmentalists were successful in creating a hostile atmosphere to the truth and made it taboo to consider certain hypotheses and facts.
 
Who Wrote This?
Carl N. Degler taught history at Vassar College from 1962 to 1968 and at Stanford University from 1968 to 1990. His legacy has been described as illuminating the experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups, including African Americans and women [1]. Degler was known as a founding feminist and was one of the first male historians to write a history of women with his 1981 book, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Neither Black Nor White about slavery and race relations. Following the publication of In Search of Human Nature, he unsurprisingly encountered some resistance from social scientists who favored environment. Degler died in 2015 at the age of 93. 

Carl N. Degler, historian

Analysis
Degler’s book was published before the dominant resurgence in the past twenty years of the modern cultural Marxism movements. This includes the trauma field, where the pendulum has swung back far to the environmentalists’ side. If a more sensible discourse is to be achieved, this underlying misconception of human nature needs to be acknowledged and attacked.
 
Degler’s book never touched on trauma. The book was published in 1991, and the trauma advocacy movements did not hit a stride until around 2000. Degler’s narrative, however, is appropriate. The various trauma advocacy movements—ACEs, toxic stress, complex PTSD, and trauma-informed care—and all the pseudoscientific fabricated traumas—developmental, complex, historical, racial, intergenerational, and climate—are based on the same premise as Marxism that human nature is highly malleable.
 
The pushback against the trauma advocacy movements has been slow, as it must be. Whereas it is easy to publish commentaries, books, and convenience research of unverified assertions that elevate trauma to the role of causing all that is wrong with society, it takes a long time to design, fund, conduct, and publish good research that answers complex questions. There are now substantial amounts of good research showing that the assertions of the trauma advocacy movements are just that—unverified and discredited assertions.
 
Overall, Degler’s book is worthy for documenting the history of one of the important paths that has led to the current eruptions of ideology in Western societies. The legitimacy of these movements is contingent on the denial of the biological basis of human nature. Degler’s contribution was to show how the tides in belief have shifted over time, how the social sciences can be easily corrupted, and the constant battle that seems will always be between ideology and truth.
 
Degler nudged up to a deeper question but never answered it. He asked several times why beliefs in environment found such friendly lodging in the minds of many social scientists when evidence of biology was before them. Yes, they acted on humanitarian impulses to make the world better, but why were those impulses so strong in certain individuals and not in others? Degler was a historian whose skill set was more to explain what happened, not the psychology of why. In my book, The Trouble With Trauma: The Search to Discover How Beliefs Become Facts, I offered an explanation based on fundamentally different moral foundations of liberals versus conservatives.
 
 
References
[1] Emily  Langer (January 9, 2015), Carl N. Degler, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of marginalized groups, dies at 93, The Washington Post. Accessed 5/20/2024)
 
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