APSA
This year's APSA conference theme is “Promoting Pluralism.” [1]
The APSA wants the profession to be seen as a home for a multitude of methods for studying politics. Whether political actors are understood as individual mechanical actors in a chain of causation, or as self-initiating, meaning creating persons engaged in a collective enterprise, the APSA pretends all viewpoints are equal.
One effect of such propaganda is to preserve the privileged position of the profession’s positivist elites – both schools and individuals – while inhibiting the humanistic growth of the field. As I have argued in prior posts, this APSA strategy reduces political science to an academic field with little relevance either to real public policy making, or to the improvement of society. [2]
One urgently needed public policy improvement concerns the way in which our hi-tech society interacts with its natural environment. Toxic gases causing global warming, clear cutting oxygen producing forests, and the genocide of one species after another are just a few of the man-made disasters defiling earth and threatening the existence of humanity itself.
The political science profession can do much to REVERSE this horrible trend.
David Easton’s Evolutionary Biology
In my view, we can start by understanding the wisdom of former APSA president David Easton. As I will show below, Easton interprets political behavior as an element of evolutionary biology. The political system is embedded in, and emerges from, its environment – which includes the natural environment as well as the political, economic, cultural, etc. environments.
Political science, for Easton, seeks to understand and explain how political systems are able to persist, or survive, in their particular environment on earth. In part, this can happen when folks living in a political system work creatively to adapt it to their environment.
In Easton’s view, the input-conversion-output political system is not the kind of instrumental system, device, or artifice that engineers or mechanics envision. Rather, Easton envisions political behavior as an expression of human nature. Just as birds live in flocks, fish live in schools, wolves live in packs, and lions live in prides, humans live in political systems.
In his book, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, Easton stated that the political scientist’s task is like that of an evolutionary biologist who might ask “with respect to biological life; How can human beings manage to exist?” But instead, the political scientist, for Easton, would seek to understand and explain “How can any political system ever persist … especially under conditions where the environment may at times be extremely hostile?” (15, 17f)
In other words, Easton placed “political life” within the broad context of biology. His political system does not function machine-like, but out of growth and evolution, it is “a general theory of the vital processes in politics.” (14 it. add.)
In my essay “The Origins of Political Behavior, and the First Political System,” at APSA Pre-Prints [3], I bring together the paleoanthropological evidence supporting Easton’s thesis. The evidence shows that over the course of evolution, humans evolved while living in social organizations centered on, as Easton says, the authoritative allocation of values.
The literature I review shows how the first patterns of behavior manifesting a political system likely took shape among a species of hominids, in east Africa, who sought to survive by communal food sharing, rather than by individual foraging, as primates do. Through sexual selection over many thousands of years, those hominids bred themselves into creatures who by nature persisted to live in ways organized around the authoritative allocation of values; that is, a political system.
Beginning around 200kya, humans evolved from those creatures and learned their way of life. Indeed, humans likely inherited the propensity to organize themselves into the pattern of a political system from their hominid forebears. However, living in a political system was not genetically determined, because they could have done otherwise. They could, for example, return to the primate practice of each individual feeding himself or herself while foraging in groups. [4] (Insects and animals have drives leading them to organize themselves into the forms unique to their species; however, as history shows, humans are capable of much more variety, complexity, creativity, and ingenuity in their form of self-organization.)
Unfortunately, Easton has been misunderstood and mischaracterized over the past 50 years for a reason. Contrary to APSA propaganda praising pluralism, Easton defines political science singularly as the study of the political system. His theory of the political system constitutes an interpretive framework for the whole political science profession that can guide political science research, help to make it more socially useful, and thus re-shape the public image of the profession. All the currently used multiple and mixed interpretive approaches are readily applicable within Easton’s unified view of our profession. [5]
How can Easton’s biological orientation for political science enable our profession to help save the environment? Perhaps more important than any government policy prohibiting oil drilling or promoting re-forestation and forms of renewable energy, is the need for hi-tech people to change their self-images. Easton’s evolutionary biology approach is instructive for this need as well.
The Self-Image
Identity politics studies show that, in general, people tend to behave in ways that are consistent with their self-image. If they learn to see themselves as a “Democrat” or “Republican,” or some other party, group, or organization, they tend to act accordingly. People in hi-tech civilizations have learned a self-image which makes the so-called “conquest of nature” seem reasonable. They have learned to see themselves as an “individual,” separate from nature and even from other people. Just as war propaganda necessarily creates images dehumanizing other human groups, so the hi-tech self-image casts nature in the role of a hostile force and as an otherwise meaningless theater of resources for exploitation.
Positivistic political science re-enforces this self-image of the alienated individual turning Reason to the task of serving oneself first. This is the central teaching of Game Theory, for example. Students are further “prepped” to see themselves this way by the stubbornly enduring yet completely false myth of each “individual” entering into a non-existent “social contract” so that each could “freely” pursue his or her self-interest. Society is reduced to a useful device for alienated individuals to take what they can from one another and from nature. “Government” is supposed to keep this “game” orderly by enforcing minimal limits.
Easton’s evolutionary biology interpretation of the political system suggests a different self-image. “Political behavior” can be seen, and taught, as the natural behavior of the human species which is everywhere engaged in the social interactions of authoritatively allocating values for their society. [6]
This vision would help shape a self-image of humans as creatures of nature who evolved out of the very earth we now act upon so brutally with our technology. Such a self-image could render causing further harms to earth for profit intolerable.
Employing Easton, the political science profession could contribute greatly to saving the environment, which hi-tech civ is now ruining, by teaching people that individuals are One with their species, and that together we are One with our natural environment. Alienation, and its accompanying aggressiveness and low regard for life, need not be a characteristic of human nature. A self-image more conducive to political cooperation could change human behavior.
In sum, the discoveries of evolutionary biology show that humans are a natural extension of earth. Behavior creating a political system has evolved into the natural behavior of our species. There never was a “social contract” negotiated by self-interested individuals.
Conclusion
APSA’s praise of pluralism gives cover to life-threatening views, like positivist Game Theory and mathematical models which teach that every individual is a self-interested competitor, alienated from one another and from their natural environment. Such self-interest is said to mechanically cause the individual to strive to conquer and exploit, limited not by moral principles but only by the laws of easily corruptible governments.
Propaganda casting political science as a Pluralist Paradise not only shields elites, but worse, it prevents the profession from realizing its full potential as an organization that can help make life better for humanity by, among other things, teaching self-understandings that will facilitate living in unity with earth.
Positivistic political science’s Mechanically Self-Serving Man theory of human nature teaches students a self-loathing self-mage that justifies the commodification of one another and our planet.
The Eastonian vision of creatures who have emerged out of earth and who have evolved to survive by living in societies centered on the authoritative allocation of values can sensitize us to our Oneness with one another and with nature. With this new self-image, hi-tech folks will form a deeper understanding of, and more receptivity to, the changes that are necessary to re-orient our civilization’s relation to our environment from exploitative to harmonious.
The political science profession is uniquely situated to take the lead in this educational cause. All we need do is to unify for that purpose.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
@InterpretivePo1
References
[1] https://connect.apsanet.org/apsa2021/theme-statement/
[2] See https://interpretat.blogspot.com/2020/11/does-political-science-force-graduate.html
Cf. https://interpretat.blogspot.com/2020/08/teaching-and-enforcing-dehumanization.html
[3] The Origins of Political Behavior, and the First Political System. APSA Preprints,
https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/5f4817b9572c8200124a3cdd
https://www.academia.edu/20299604/Can_Chimpanzee_Politics_Constitute_a_Political_System
[6] Easton reviewed the anthropology literature of his time to see if it confirmed his thesis. However, he found that anthropologists were not interpreting indigenous societies through the political system framework. He hoped this would be done in the future. See Easton, David. “Political Anthropology,” pp. 210-260. 1959. In Biennial Review of Anthropology. Bernard Siegel (ed). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
https://archive.org/details/biennialreviewof033489mbp/page/n1/mode/2up
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