Douglas Rushkoff’s new book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires discusses the totally predictable, and yet otherworldly phenomenon of the world’s ultra-wealthy preparing for the end of the world. Convinced that we are on the precipice of an “Event” of some sort, many of the world’s elites are privately doing the numbers, trying to figure out how to jump ship.
Amid the discussion of luxury bunkers, resource stockpiling on private islands, and the ins and outs of keeping one’s security force from going rogue, there’s a particularly fascinating section in the beginning of Chapter 5, where Rushkoff recalls a meeting he was present for with famed evolutionary biologist and everyone’s gateway author to New Atheism, Richard Dawkins.
It was still just the 20th century, and most people didn’t yet know what memes were.
“Have you ever seen one of these?” Dawkins asked, as he held up his completed origami fortune teller for the dozen or so members of the New York intelligentsia who were gathered around the sofa.
Of course, we all remembered making and playing with what my childhood friends called a “cootie-catcher.”
“This is a meme.” The fold-up paper fortuneteller varied very little over time, he explained. That’s because it is not simply an object, but a set of instructions, a way of folding paper into a specific configuration. Kids learn how to do it, and then show their friends. Those instructions pass from person to person, both geographically, and through history. The people, he explained, are just carriers for the meme. We execute its instructions like an organism following its genetic code, or a computer running some lines of javascript. “Fold the corners like this, then fold sideways like that.”
It didn’t make sense to me. My own book on viral media was based on very different observations about our relationship to memes. To me, memes were just the code within media viruses, and better understood as hidden agendas in popular culture. The Rodney King tape may have contained powerful memes about police brutality and race relations, I explained, but the reason the tape became a phenomenon was our readiness as human beings. We had repressed this subject for too long, so we were triggered into a national conversation and conflict by the images that had forced the issue into the light of day. The memes aren’t “running” us like software runs a computer; we use the memes the same way we use language, or our bodies-to express ourselves and enact change. We are conscious actors, not passive machines running code. Dawkins dismissed my argument as “wishful thinking.”
This acts as an introduction to the school of neo-Darwinism and the field of sociobiology, an approach to human sociology which attempts to explain people and their societies in terms of evolution-other terms for this view applied by its detractors are biological or genetic determinism, with selfish gene theory and memetics being some of its more influential outcomes.
Dawkins is known for being one of the more strident defenders of this theory, which has often been critiqued as reductionistic and anti-humanistic, regarding humans essentially as gene robots who’s decisions can be explained (depending on the individual theorist) either largely or entirely in terms of the self-replication of genes. In elevating the role of an organism’s genes, sociobiology is often accused of losing track of the organism itself. This is demonstrated explicitly further into Rushkoff’s encounter with Dawkins in the book:
I suggested that the universe “leans” in a certain way. “Evolution is not just random selection, I offered, but life groping towards something-complexity, consciousness, compassion. We’re not just driven by genes. The earliest humans shared food with one another, even when there was no personal benefit. Human evolution is not best characterized by competition-it’s a story of collaboration.
He and some of the other men laughed. He said I was misinterpreting “reciprocal altruism,” the necessary but very provisional and temporary ways we cooperate in order to ensure the survival of our genes. Any empathy or urge to share with others is a stimulus generated by our DNA for its own, selfish ends.
Rushkoff has here stumbled into a heated debate in biology and naturalist philosophy, one which has been ongoing since sociobiology’s introduction in E.O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, incidentally the same year Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was published. Dawkins in particular has always seemed to take an almost perverse pleasure in disabusing people of their naive notions that an individual’s existence might amount to more than mere gene replication, or that a society’s existence might be more than a host population for competing memes.
Several pre-eminent biologists insisted since its inception that there are core problems with sociobiology on a scientific level (something I’ll explore below, as best I can as a layman), but concerns were also raised quite quickly about what transmitting such messages to the public would do to us on a moral level. Sociobiology (despite its defenders desire to claim otherwise) implies a Panglossian ontology in which ours is “the best of all possible worlds” precisely because it is the only possible world, since humans lack any agency by which to change it. Whatever we have is the best we can hope for, we seem to be told. Worse still, it’s not at all clear how a sociobiologist delineates right and wrong, since traditionally recognized “goods” such as love, kindness, freedom, or what have you are recast as mere evolutionary devices for replication, literally as illusions the genes create to get us to behave as if we were concerned with their replication, all the while imagining that we are actually oriented towards some higher purpose.
This is a problem Dawkins seems consistently blindsided by every time he is asked about it. When the question is advanced to him in an interview with Alex O’Connor, Dawkins finds himself blurting out the rather shocking statement that “I don’t actually have a comeback to some sadist who comes along and says ‘I think suffering is wonderful.’” Eventually, he comes to what he describes as a “Sam Harris type axiom-almost” that “suffering is bad.” This tortured half-utilitarianism is about the best we can hope for from hardline sociobiologists. Good and bad can’t exist from this viewpoint-there’s just what helps genes replicate, and what doesn’t. Again, sociobiology’s orientation towards ethics will be expanded upon further below.
Certainly, Dawkins doesn’t like suffering, nor does he like people who do; he just doesn’t have any good reason not to. He is, as Alex Rosenberg called it, a “nice nihilist”-someone who is good, in the vaguest possible sense, simply because he happens to prefer to be. What are we to think of people who don’t share our preferences? Evidently, admit that they’re every bit as justified in their preferences as we are-we’d just rather not live alongside them. But even if we can agree (for whatever reason) that suffering is bad, we have no particular reason to choose to tolerate the suffering of others if it reduces our own-the moral orientation necessarily adopted by any beneficiary of global capitalism. Human reason has no role to play, because human reason doesn’t actually exist-it is a mere illusion created by our genes to lure us towards their further replication. Dawkins can’t be expected to have strong arguments for a particular ethical framework-he’s a scientist, not a philosopher-but that’s the problem: sociobiologists have repeatedly made the argument that science of their particularly harsh framework should have the final word on ethical questions-a position Wilson endorsed in Sociobiology. It’s hard to see how we can base an ethical society-something we all seem to agree would be desirable in the abstract-on a viewpoint which rejects ethics as a mere ploy for gene replication.
The Sociobiology Wars
When Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and others in the scientific community decried sociobiology as a more polite recapitulation of social darwinism, they were largely dismissed as moralists who were putting their leftist do-gooderism before scientific rigor. Ironically, they accused sociobiology of the same thing-a theory entrapped by the ideological assumptions of its authors, who read between the lines of biological reality to produce a disinterested-sounding theory which in fact served to naturalize all the injustices of the neoliberal capitalist order, and further, to debase humanity, removing any legitimate grounds for ethics. Sociobiology was thus framed as one of what Murray Bookchin called “epistemologies of rule,” philosophies which find ways to justify the political and economic order in which they are founded.
I’ve done my best to give sociobiology a fair hearing, however, and in my honest opinion, this is a totally unfair depiction: Wilson’s text is far too nuanced to be reduced to a crude Spencerian Social Darwinism. Indeed, Wilson explicitly presents a case for, and then soundly refutes the genetic superiority of ruling classes in Sociobiology’s final chapter (emphasis added):
A key question of human biology is whether there exists a genetic predisposition to enter certain classes and to play certain roles. Circumstances can be easily conceived in which such genetic differentiation might occur. The heritability of at least some parameters of intelligence and emotive traits is sufficient to respond to a moderate amount of disruptive selection. Dahlberg (1947) showed that if a single gene appears that is responsible for success and an upward shift in status, it can be rapidly concentrated in the uppermost socioeconomic classes. Suppose, for example, there are two classes, each beginning with a 1 percent frequency of the homozygotes of the upward-mobile gene. Suppose further that 50 percent of the homozygotes in the lower class are transferred upward in each generation. Then in only ten generations, depending on the relative sizes of the groups, the upper class will be comprised of as many as 20 percent homozygotes or more and the lower class of as few as .5 percent or less. Using a similar argument, Herrnstein (1971b) proposed that as environmental opportunities become more nearly equal within societies, socioeconomic groups will be defined increasingly by genetically based differences in intelligence.
A strong initial bias toward such stratification is created when one human population conquers and subjugates another, a common enough event in human history. Genetic differences in mental traits, however slight, tend to be preserved by the raising of class barriers, racial and cultural discrimination, and physical ghettos. The geneticist C.D. Darlington (1969), among others, postulated this process to be a prime source of genetic diversity within human societies.
Yet despite the plausibility of the general argument, there is little evidence of any hereditary solidification of status. The castes of India have been in existence for 2000 years, more than enough time for evolutionary divergence, but they differ only slightly in blood type and other measurable anatomical and physiological traits. Powerful forces can be identified that work against the genetic fixation of caste differences. First, cultural evolution is too fluid. Over a period of decades or at most centuries ghettos are replaced, races and subject people are liberated, the conquerors are conquered. Even within relatively stable societies the pathways of upward mobility are numerous. The daughters of lower classes tend to marry upward. Success in commerce or political life can launch a family from virtually any socioeconomic group into the ruling class in a single generation. Furthermore, there are many Dahlberg genes, not just the one postulated for argument in the simplest model. The hereditary factors of human success are strongly phylogenic and form a long list, only a few of which have been measured. IQ constitutes only one subset of the components of intelligence. Less tangible but equally important qualities are creativity, entrepreneurship, drive, and mental stamina. Let us assume that the genes contributing to these qualities are scattered over many chromosomes. Assume further that some of the traits are uncorrelated or even negatively correlated. Under these circumstances only the most intense forms of disruptive selection could result in the formation of stable ensembles of genes. A much more likely circumstance is the one that apparently prevails: the maintenance of a large amount of genetic diversity within societies and the loose correlation of some of the genetically determined traits with success. This scrambling process is accelerated by the continuous shift in the fortunes of individual families from one generation to the next.
Wilson is clear: while there is likely a correlation between certain genes and economic or social success, this correlation is not consistent because the traits which lead to success don’t necessarily come packaged together in the genome. Thus a particularly brilliant mathematician might be socially inept, an artistic genius may be completely incapable of managing their finances, or a person may have incredible capacity for logistics and efficient planning, but this capacity is fatally handicapped by a poor short-term memory or an addictive personality. And even though there will be some individuals who have the right combinations of these traits, and they will be more likely to advance into the ruling class, this doesn’t increase the likelihood that their kids will have the same ideal combination dramatically enough to result in clear genomic differences between economic classes. Indeed, many of the traits we view as singular are in fact the product of multiple genes-a 2017 paper in Nature Genetics, for instance, identified 22 different genes associated with intelligence. The observation made in Plato’s Republic 2400 years ago holds true-the children of great or brilliant men are often despicable or stupid, and the children of despicable or stupid men are often great or brilliant. Mere heredity, then, does not a worthy aristocracy make.
More problematic for Wilson’s theory is that even these 22 genes could only be found to account for around 5% of differences in intelligence scores. This raises the question: if all of our social life has a biological foundation, as sociobiology hypothesizes, just how large and significant is that foundation? In reality, is there any actual difference of opinion between Wilson and his critics, or is the issue not one of different hypotheses, but different emphases on the same general theory?
Anti-Philosophical Science
Wilson is careful to avoid affirmatively ascribing any social characteristic to genes, except, oddly, for one extremely important one: ethics. In the first chapter, Wilson makes an especially extreme claim:
To his own question, ‘Does the Absurd dictate death?’ Camus replied that the struggle toward the heights is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. This arid judgment is probably correct, but it makes little sense except when closely examined in the light of evolutionary theory. The hypothalamic-limbic complex of a highly social species, such as man, “knows,” or more precisely it has been programmed to perform as if it knows, that its underlying genes will be proliferated maximally only if it orchestrates behavioral responses that bring into play an efficient mixture of personal survival, reproduction, and altruism. Consequently, the centers of the complex tax the conscious mind with ambivalences whenever the organisms encounter stressful situations. Love joins hate; aggression, fear; expansiveness, withdrawal; and so on; in blends designed not to promote the happiness and survival of the individual, but to favor the maximum transmission of the controlling genes.
He sharpens this claim further in the last chapter:
In the first chapter of this book I argued that ethical philosophers intuit the deontological canons of morality by consulting the emotive centers of their own hypothalamic-limbic system. This is also true of the developmentalists, even when they are being their most severely objective.
Thus, Wilson argues:
Only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the canons be deciphered.
Here Wilson appears to endorse a particularly stark form of emotivism, as advanced by analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer-the claim that statements of value indicate nothing other than personal preference-for example, to say “it’s good that you went on vacation” indicates nothing about your going on vacation other than:
You did go on a vacation and
I approve of that
In other words, statements of what is good or bad are not metaphysical, but rather mere indications of personal preference-there is no higher good the goodness of your vacation exists in reference to, I’m merely stating that I’m pleased about it, and you should be as well.
There are strong arguments for and against emotivism as an ethical theory (Ayer himself came to reject it). But to any reasonably experienced reader of ethical philosophy, Wilson’s claim that a given thinker’s ethics are the pure product of emotional preference appears bizarre and reductionist to the point of absurdity. Certainly, it’s highly unlikely that there is no emotional role being played in the mind of a philosopher, but these emotions don’t exist apropos of nothing-each philosopher exists in a social, historical, and cultural context which clearly influences their positions. It’s hard to imagine that if Aristotle had been raised in the United States in the 20th century, he would have defended slavery; had John Stuart Mill been raised in a hunter-gatherer tribe, it’s difficult to imagine him ever arriving at utilitarianism. One finds it very difficult to understand how anyone could arrive, through pure emotivism, at a position like that of antinatalist philosopher David Benatar, who argues that having children is always morally wrong, that early-term abortion is the only ethical approach to pregnancy, and that human extinction would be a moral good.
These views are not merely the products of consultations with one’s own hypothalamic-limbic complex-they are the product of a dialectical relationship between an individual’s emotions, reason, and the context in which those things exist-a culture, a political zeitgeist, a history, etc. Wilson seems to acknowledge this in every other context, but for whatever reason, he feels particular freedom in the realm of ethics to take his theory to its fullest extent and declare that
Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.
Certainly, Wilson’s critics were ideological-no leftist could accept the idea that our social system was necessarily the best of all possible systems, or that social hierarchies were natural. But while they had acknowledged philosophical precommitments, they had scientific arguments as well, pointing out quite correctly the trap sociobiology so often falls into of telling “just so” stories to make the evidence fit the theory, a failure to account for the dialectical relationship between each organism and its environment, and particularly in the human case, the immense problem of human culture and reason, which take paths totally inexplicable in purely genetic terms, and which thereby influence the organism from which they originated, creating feedback loops which are in no way genetic.
The other problem is that since Sociobiology was published, attempts to explain social behavior in genetic terms have been largely disappointing. For instance, there has long been discussion about the prospect of discovering a “gay gene.” While the most recent research has identified numerous genes which bear some influence on sexual behavior, there has been no one-to-one link between the two. A massive 2019 study found that “genetics could explain 8–25% of the variation in sexual behaviour.”
Wilson hedges his bets in the text, but he can’t get around the all-encompassing nature of his thesis: “Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior.”
The result has been one that was predicted by Stephen Jay Gould in a 1978 piece for New Scientist:
My crystal ball shows the human sociobiologists retreating to a fallback position-indeed it is happening already. They will argue that this fallback is as powerful as their original position, though it actually represents the unravelling of their fondest hopes. They will argue: yes, indeed, we cannot tell whether an adaptive behavior is genetically coded or not. But it doesn’t matter. The same adaptive constraints apply whether the behavior evolved by cultural or Darwinian routes, and biologists have identified and explicated the adaptive constraints.
None of this is to minimize the role of genetics in the formation and behavior of organisms-a role none of sociobiology’s critics denied. But it is to argue that the Greeks were right to say that reason and speech are crucial aspects of human beings which differentiate them from other beings, and to reinforce the primacy of reason as an emergent property of human life and culture. Human reason, like technology, has a basis in the genes, to be sure, but its development is not a matter merely of memes, but of dialectics-the capacity for genuinely creative and innovative thought achieved through rational discourse between honest, good faith human interlocutors, allowing humans to arrive at higher levels of understanding which selfish genes cannot claim credit for. It is this more enriched understanding of organisms as participants in their environments, changing them as they are also changed by them to produce novel forms, which sociobiology’s critics, particularly Lewontin and Richard Levins in works such as The Dialectical Biologist and Biology Under the Influence, advanced as an alternative to the sociobiological framework. I plan to discuss those works in a later piece.
The Social Consequences of Sociobiology
Rushkoff instead goes for the jugular, pointing out that Jeffrey Epstein had thoroughly imbibed an extreme sociobiological position far beyond what Wilson had advanced, surrounded himself with scientists, including sociobiologists like Dawkins and Robert Trivers, and coincidentally also believed that impregnating as many young women as possible with his top-quality genes was the closest thing to a good act he could carry out in the world. Obviously, that’s psychotic, and a million miles from anything Wilson intended when he published his book (nor any other sociobiologist since), because Jeffrey Epstein was probably a psychopath. But nevertheless, the outcome is a lesson sadly learned and re-learned throughout history: ideas are important, because they have consequences.
There’s nothing about sociobiology in and of itself that claims that billionaires should “seed the human race” with their DNA. But it does argue that people succeed or fail in some large part because of their genetics. It is, unfortunately, a very short walk from A to B. Epstein never actually got around to carrying out his hypernatalist plans, but then, who knows what goes on in the very weird, very rich world of transhumanism.
Rushkoff’s book is, in large part, about how bad, delusional people justify doing bad, delusional things. Narcissistic billionaires, convinced they’re the lucky vehicles of wildly superior genes, trying to find ways to survive their own success-regardless of what happens to us genetically inferior meat robots who haven’t been naturally selected, who aren’t part of what Rushkoff refers to as “The Mindset”. That sounds like a cruel and sociopathic disposition, but then, who’s to say those are bad things?
To be fair, a vaguely realized embrace of sociobiology is far from the only convenient and vacant ideology the wealthy have found for themselves. In the book, he also encounters the Burning Man set-those who have “expanded their minds” on psychedelics and, instead of trying to escape the world they’re destroying, have become convinced they have the key to saving it. Some of these are self-aware scam artists, but many probably do really believe they have a mission from the earth spirits to free us all from our benighted ignorance and guide us into the light. These are probably the most dangerous. For my part, I’ll take a nihilist over a fanatic any day. As Rushkoff observes, though:
In what might be The Mindset’s greatest crime against the human project, these totalizing solutions perpetuate the myth that only a technocratic elite can possibly fix our problems. They distract and discourage the rest of us from making substantive changes to the way we live, and divert limited funding to moonshot boondoggles, all while making the wealthiest even wealthier. They solve for humanity, as if we humans were the problem.
This tracks one of the larger themes of the book: the way good intentions and good ideas become twisted by capitalism into mere recapitulations of the problems they were meant to solve. The internet starts out as a niche space for brilliant weirdos, where new ideas can flourish; capitalism instead gives us pornhub and social media. Space travel gives a new goal and purpose for the human race, allowing us to imagine billions of future generations outliving our solar system; instead it has become a fantasy of escape from the human race for a handful of the richest people on earth. Entrepreneurs promise to save the world with green energy development plans; green capitalism now occurs as just one behavioral economic strategy to get well-meaning people to spend more money than they would otherwise on technologies that will never properly scale, and will destroy the environment they’re intended to preserve in the process of attempting to do so.
The wealthy, for the most part (the Burning Man-TED talk circuit runners notwithstanding), are not stupid: even while they talk a big game, they do know that capitalism and the habitability of the planet are incompatible. They may not say it-they may not even say it to themselves-but their actions belie the truth. They know we’re fucked, and they want out.
But, as Rushkoff insisted to Dawkins, life does actually mean something, and to allow it to serve merely as the fuel to give the world’s billionaires some hope of making a go of it off-world, to perhaps eke out a few more pointless years away from the annoying and inconvenient needs and chatter of the underclass of which the rest of life is composed, would be a tragedy. The way to survive our self-inflicted crisis is not to simply do everything we’ve done up to this point faster-it’s to change course, consciously and with clear intent, away from an unsustainable and unconscionable trajectory, and towards a future which is long, ecologically sound, rational, and free. That cannot be achieved if we hopelessly tie ourselves to biological determinism, or to a rejection of moral philosophy in favor of a convenient nihilism which frees us from responsibility for our actions.