Taxonomy as Politics: The Harm of False Classification

...I think one of the things that many people confuse is the behavior of cocaine and heroin addicts when they are deprived of the drug...

...Rather, the biological and neurological constraints upon mental activity probably have their main expression in pervasively general, but highly abstract structural rules—the universal grammar of Chomskyan theory (that can generate any specific language as a complex sociohistorical instance), or even (to present a humorous recursion to the premise of this article) the tendency to order by dichotomy and division...

...True reform would require the overthrow of habits in thought dating at least to Plato...

...More important, since classifications are actively imposed, not passively imbibed, they shape our thoughts and deeds in ways that we scarcely perceive because we view our categories as "obvious" and "natural...

...human civilization is a form of domestication...

...These identifications have often held, especially in our century, but they arose from particular contingencies, not from a necessary logic of argument...

...Classifications are therefore theories of order, not simple records of nature—and what could be more fascinating...

...The affected children so often come from ordinary homes, filled with normal siblings and loving parents...

...I could abide (though I would still oppose) our current intransigence if we applied the principle of total interdiction to all harmful drugs...

...Cicero tells a story about a certain Zopyrus who accused Socrates of inborn vice, easily inferred from his physiognomy...

...Socrates's disciples defended their master as inherently virtuous, but Socrates insisted that Zopyrus was quite correct...

...He therefore decided that autism was a sociogenic condition unwittingly caused by parents under stress and inadequately instructed in childrearing...

...The growth of this tragedy could be halted dramatically (though years would be needed to recover from damage already done) by the single act of legalization...

...But when humans struggle with other humans, the boundaries are almost always fluid and largely arbitrary (or at least a curious result of very recent historical contingencies...

...Tinbergen and E. A. Tinbergen, "Autistic" Children: New Hope for a Cure, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983...

...I wish to present, in this essay, two diverse examples—the classification of drugs and yet another swipe at the primal dichotomy of nature and nurture...

...The left must struggle to develop its critique and its program, not by eschewing biology and leaving a phony argument about determinism for exploitation by opponents, and not merely by condemning false biological claims—but by understanding and then substituting the genuine, nonreductionist view of interaction for the older sterility of nature vs...

...Rangel...

...Human equality, in this restricted WINTER • 1990 • 77 Culture in an Age of Money biological sense, is a contingent fact of history...

...no blow could be more cruel for parents who have to cope with so much...

...Don't you get it, Mr...

...Billions of dollars go down the rathole to enrich the entrepreneurs or to try to stem the plague by necessarily ineffective interdiction...

...nurture, as a statement WINTER • 1990 • 75 Culture In an Age of Money about flexibility, is the ideology of the left...

...Sweep dogmas aside, and no other explanation makes sense...

...He did possess the tendencies to vice, but had prevented their expression through the exercise of reason...

...the cultures of whole peoples severely compromised...

...There is no "real" human nature at a biological core, diluted like the shadows on Plato's cave by environmental components of any resulting behavior...

...You can get it whenever you want to satisfy the craving...

...He devoted his Nobel prize lecture to the subject in 1973 and, late in his life, wrote an entire book to advance his ideas (N...

...The Legalization of "Drugs" Some classifications channel our thinking into fruitful directions because they properly capture the causes of order...

...For this and many other reasons, the parents of autists deserve as much compassion, and may be as much in need of help, as the autists themselves...

...or if ancestral species had survived and presented us with the dilemma of a group whose humanity could not be denied, but whose mentality could not match ours...

...So what was inborn in Socrates and what the effect of nurture...

...As an intellectual, nothing drives me to tears more quickly than massive human tragedy abetted by senselessness...

...Second, and more important, pure environmentalism can be as cruel and as illiberal as the worst expressions of biological determinism...

...Koop properly replied that the only difference resides in social definition as legal or illegal: "You take cigarettes off the streets and people will be breaking into liquor stores...

...natural is honed to functional optimality in Darwinian fires...

...To cite just one example...

...But who can calculate the aggregate suffering imposed by rampant Freudianism, condemning so many parents to lives of crushing guilt as supposed agents, through inadequate nurture, of mental illness or retardation in their children—when it should have been so obvious that minds, as well as bodies, must also be subject to genetic and congenital malfunction...

...2. Representative Charles Rangel, implacable foe of legalization, spurns all talk about this 74 • DISSENT Wham in an Age of Money subject as the chatter of eggheads...

...But so many people then imagine that the more sophisticated position calls for "interaction" in the construction of each behavior from differently titrated mixtures of the two primal components—as in the common and nonsensical statement that intelligence is 80 percent inherited and 20 percent environmental...

...In this respect it seems that working-class and peasant mothers are, intuitively or of necessity, better mothers than many intellectuals and over-affluent mothers with few children...

...No one has ever raised a child without making some minor, even systematic, mistakes...

...Tobacco is perfectly legal...

...if the term "human nature" has any meaning at all, it can only specify an interaction that cannot be reduced by decomposition into nature and nurture...

...Tinbergen, cofounder with Konrad Lorenz of modern ethology, was perhaps the world's greatest observer of animal behavior...

...This can often be traced back to something in the early environment—on occasion a frightening accident, but most often something in the behavior of parents, in particular the mothers...

...Know thyself...

...I loved Niko Tinbergen, but I cannot read these words without welling anger...

...Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony taxonomy...

...He then invoked the favorite themes of classical ethology—natural is right...

...But this version of interactionism only provides the smallest improvement over the original dichotomy, for it maintains the false classification without change: that is, we are now allowed to mix the two ingredients, but they remain as the indivisible (and recoverable) elements of all overt phenomena...

...He also believed that the rearing methods of other 76 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money vertebrates might offer clues for useful strategies in therapy...

...All parents would have to be paragons of instinctive perfection...

...I feel the same way about legalization of at least some of the substances now classified as illicit drugs...

...Protagoras asserted, according to Diogenes, "that there were two sides to every question, exactly opposite to each other...

...We set up our categories, often by arbitrary division based on tiny differences...

...An old joke— perhaps it even happened—from the bad old days of McCarthyism tells of a leftist rally in Philadelphia, viciously broken up by the police...

...q 78 • DISSENT...

...In my more cynical moments, I sometimes think that we cling to the nonsensical separation of nature and nurture primarily for reasons of euphony (much like the division between God's "words" and "works," so popular in past centuries)—for I can't think of any other possible justification...

...But how can we possibly defend our current policy based on an absurd dichotomy that encourages us to view one class of substances with ultimate horror as preeminent scourges of life (so heroin joins this group, while chemical cognates no more different from heroin than lemonade from iced tea perform work of enormous compassion by relieving the pain of terminal cancer patients in their last days)—while the two most dangerous and life-destroying substances by far, alcohol and tobacco, form a second class advertised in neon on every street corner of urban America...

...Are we not significantly lowering the quality of American life for everyone, and causing millions of deaths directly, by basing our drug policy on something even worse—a false and senseless classification...

...I think they should both be controlled and decriminalized...

...Nature vs...

...if cows declared war on chickens, we might deplore the barnyard carnage, but at least the divisions would be deep, and membership by birth could not be disputed...

...Taxonomy, or the study of classification, occupies a low status among the sciences because most people view the activity as a kind of glorified bookkeeping dedicated to pasting objects into preassigned spaces in nature's stamp album...

...3. Former Surgeon General Everett Koop, who was hired by Reagan to be an ideologue and decided to be a doctor instead, properly branded nicotine as no less addicting than heroin and cocaine...

...nurture cannot be a viable candidate if biology gives us a broad substrate of flexibility, and circumstance fleshes out a particular result by mixing influences into a brew flavored by interactions that have no meaning or definition as piles of components...

...First, the identification of biological causes with conservative interests is a limited and recent phenomenon...

...Very often they seem to have been either simply inexperienced . . . or overapprehensive...

...Methadone and heroin are both opiates, but methadone is legal as a controlled substitute for heroin (fine by me...

...You might as well say that a Coke blocks the craving for a Pepsi...

...But Tinbergen went further and developed a theory for the causes of autism...

...You cannot take an essential integrity and divide it into two opposing agents of construction...

...At the moment, hundreds of thousands of people live in tortured limbo, driven to crime, exposed to AIDS, and doomed (at least statistically speaking) to early death...

...In some social classes at least, the primary pleasure of the last generation is now regarded as a pathology...

...It doesn't matter how many times a learned man says that he's not blaming you even though you did it...

...Consider just a few recent items rooted in our false classification...

...or overefficient and intrusive...

...yet no subject has been more undiscussible (despite a few hopeful signs during the past few months), and no advocacy guarantees a more certain political kiss of death...

...1. A New York Times editorial describes methadone as a drug that "blocks the craving for heroin...

...We are social creatures built by biological evolution...

...By the way, in legalizing at least marijuana and the opiates, I would not permit the advertising that we accept for alcohol and tobacco...

...I would then take the billions of dollars saved by ending ineffective law enforcement and launch the most massive educational and advertising campaign in American history to discourage the use of all dangerous substances...

...Biology is not a right-wing plot...

...The members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, who campaigned for temperance during the day, drank their valued "women's tonics" at night, products laced with laudanum (tincture of opium...

...In quantitative terms, I suppose that no misuse of "nurture" will ever match the millions of lives restricted or curtailed in the name of "nature" through the theory of biological determinism...

...could evolution make a creature so fragile that the most impalpable of defects in rearing could so derail normal development...

...Nature" forged its appeal in the utility of biological determinism as support for the inevitability of social inequality...

...We seem to think by dichotomies and separations...

...This mistaken judgment rests on the false premise that our categories are given by nature and ascertained by simple, direct observation...

...Joan Baez once said of nonviolence that it WINTER • 1990 • 73 Culture in an Ago of Money had been a terrible flop, but that the only worse strategy was violence...

...A passerby gets caught in the melee and, as the cops are beating him, he pleads: "Stop, stop, I'm an anticommunist...

...We unwittingly acknowledge the previous legality of cocaine every time we ask for the world's most popular cola by brand name...

...But our classifications permit a majority of Americans to live well enough with one, while forcing a minority to murder and die for the other...

...The syndrome can be so devastating, so stereotyped in its expression...

...He writes (New York Times, Op-Ed, May 17, 1988): "Let's take this legalization issue and put it where it belongs—amid idle chit-chat as cocktail glasses knock together at social events...

...He made a crucial mistake in concluding that the increase in frequency of autism represented a growing pathology of modern life rather than an artifact of improved reporting (the syndrome was not even defined until 1943...

...Nurture" can act as a theory of blame and limitation, while "nature" can be liberating in two senses—either as a reassertion of the Jeffersonian hope that a proper definition of human nature will break boundaries, or only by an understanding of Spinoza's dictum that true freedom is the recognition of necessity...

...Cesare Lombroso and the other Italian founders of criminal anthropology in the late nineteenth century viewed themselves as socialists committed to a more rational order that would fit punishment to the nature of wrongdoers (and thereby enhance the prospect of reform) rather than to the character of their actions...

...But two arguments should convince us that this correlation of false dichotomies only deepens the individual errors—and that, to be programmatic for a moment, the left has erred greatly in shunning biology...

...I would package these substances in the equivalent of plain brown wrappers and make them available under some form of medical supervision...

...I know many parents of severely autistic children...

...I use "nonsensical" here in the literal, not the pejorative, meaning...

...We must understand enough about modern genetics and paleontology to grasp the surprising fact that human races differ so very little by virtue of the large range of variability within each group and the minor average distances between groups...

...Opiates were legal in America before the Harrison Act of 1914, originally passed as a revenue measure...

...Our struggle would then be to find the best divisions—to marry the biological ineluctables of a deep substrate with any overt expression...

...We have, after all, done reasonably well in our tentative and piecemeal efforts against cigarettes during the last twenty years...

...A different tradition has viewed biology as an agent of social reform—a call for realignment and liberation based on biological potentials not permitted expression in the light of false social definitions...

...Several of the original Fabians were committed eugenicists who placed their hope for a happier socialist future in the breeding of better people...

...Just think what we might accomplish if we really tried...

...Nature, as a theory of limits and inequality, is supposed to be the domain of the right...

...then, mistaking names for moral principles, and using banners and slogans as substitutes for reason, we vow to live or die for one or the other side of a false dichotomy...

...in the meantime, we wallow in absurdity, and the consequence is death on a massive scale...

...They are ordinary, loving people whose lives have been touched deeply and permanently by a biological tragedy...

...If we are so prepared to base our struggles on group identification, we should at least try to understand (and maybe even to improve) our methods of classification...

...Such a strategy makes about as much sense as trying to explain the character of table salt from the properties of sodium metal and chlorine gas, two serious poisons...

...William Jennings Bryan argued that we were about to crucify mankind on a cross of gold...

...Their procedure could be characterized as "watching all the time, but acting only when the baby demands it, either by giving signs of distress or by being reckless...

...Decriminalization has many supporters, situated in high places and possessed of truly expert knowledge...

...We must recognize that this fact emerges as a consequence of the geologically insignificant period of separation for modern races (we may all have shared a common ancestor in Africa less than 250,000 years ago...

...We might have lived in a different world with different moral dilemmas—if, for example, human races were very old and had accumulated significant differences...

...domesticated animals often lose these natural instincts...

...biology can be liberating...

...The situation is lamentable enough when the boundaries are profound and natural...

...This erroneous dichotomy of nature and nurture is then worsened by an equally false correlation with the oversimplified political dichotomy of right and left...

...Then, in his Nobel lecture, published in 1974, he added: Many autists are potentially normal children, whose affiliation and subsequent socialization processes have gone wrong in one way or another...

...Nonetheless, Niko Tinbergen, the most saintly man who ever graced my profession, was a major promoter of the sociogenic theory...

...nurture...

...We permit methadone because some favorable features lead to easier control (oral administration, longer action, and a less intense high), but methadone is a chemical cousin to heroin...

...we have lost our automatic "feel" for best ways, while increased crowding, pollution, and stress encourage disfunctional behavior...

...or, perhaps most often they are people who are themselves under stress...

...What do we have but the man as an integrity...

...We must recognize that the biological influences upon behavior do not generally lie in the superficial traits of overt and adaptive action that sociobiologists love to discuss in the speculative mode...

...I don't care what kind of communist you are," says the cop, as he continues his pummeling...

...My handicapped son, who is not classically autistic, attends a class for "higher functioning" children in a fine school primarily dedicated to autists...

...We cannot prevail if we abandon a powerful source of argument to opponents who use it falsely...

...Too rarely, in our political criticism, do we look to false taxonomies, particularly to improper dichotomies, as the basis for inadequate analysis...

...Let me hasten to add that in saying this we are not blaming these unfortunate parents...

...We would have to acknowledge that the so-called interaction is the essence of the thing itself, not the epiphenomenal expression of pure and underlying causes...

...Rather, we must struggle to get biology right ourselves...

...natural works best...

...Nature is full of facts—and they are not distributed isotropically (that is, with common properties), so nature does provide some hints about divisions...

...Representative Terry Bruce (D-IL) challenged this assertion by arguing that smokers are not "breaking into liquor stores late at night to get money to buy a pack of cigarettes...

...Millions of others suffer palpably from the deeds of the addicted— experiencing violence, robbery, or simple urban fear that steals the joy of life...

...Is such an idea even vaguely credible...

...The politics of several nations in our hemisphere are corrupted...

...We do not ponder the bases of our classifications with sufficient scrutiny...

...In 1972, he wrote about the necessary and ever so subtle adjustment between too much and too little and argued that both animals and lower-class mothers find the right balance "naturally" (and thereby save their children from autism): We believe that one can learn a great deal from observing female mammals in the process of rearing their young...

...But our classifications are human impositions, or at least culturally based decisions on what to stress among a plethora of viable alternatives...

...As a professional taxonomist, nothing makes me more angry than senselessness based on patently false classifications...

...That the cruelty rests upon a manifest falsehood only deepens the injustice...

...Most of us understand that complex behavioral traits cannot be attributed either directly to genetics or to environmental composition on the tabula rasa...

...Nature and Nurture Resartus With this most contentious issue of the ages, we encounter the added complexity of a doubly false dichotomy—first of the subject itself and second of political allegiances supposedly owed to one side or the other...

...The stuff in the glasses is as bad as the stuff on the streets...

...He thought that nonverbal methods of communication in other vertebrates might offer some hints in interpreting the behaviors of autistic children without language...

...If we are compelled to think by classification, it behooves us even more to examine the basis of our divisions...

...I suspect that he was correct in these conjectures, and that his specific suggestions were both humane and useful in many cases...

...This, he hastened to add, was nobody's fault and should elicit no blame, but the cause still lay predominantly with mothers not sufficiently devoted to childrearing amidst the maelstrom of modern stresses and commitments...

...For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we have divided a group of nonfood substances into items purchasable for supposed pleasure, and illicit drugs...

...No well-informed person now doubts that serious forms of classical childhood autism represent a biologically based disability (perhaps curable with better definition and understanding in the future, but not open to such basic intervention today, alas)—subject, of course, to an enormous range of expression dependent upon quality of parenting, education, therapy, and so on...

...I will then argue that the common theme of false division underlies a web of human tragedy in each case...

...That's the difference between a licit and an illicit drug...

...Psychobabble never could, or dared, claim that the parental insult once so widely blamed for autism could be any more than a subtle mistake—a minor deficit or oversufficiency of maternal attention (always blame the mothers of course)—amplified by peculiar loops of positive feedback to a syndrome of such desperate disfunctionality...

...Bazarov, the leftist intellectual who dissects frogs in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, represents a prototype for the general argument...

...others lead us to tragic and vicious errors (the older taxonomies of human races, for example) because they sink their roots in prejudice and mayhem...

...In technical parlance, when interactions are nonaddictive, then resulting expressions are emergent, and not reducible to contributing factors viewed as pure components...