Suppose you were to decide I was right
about everything I've said about evo psych. What would the
implications be? I have argued that since "is" and "ought"
should be clearly separated, there is absolutely no message about the
desirability of changing society in line with goals we choose. Evo
psych may predict that it will be difficult, but it never says we
should not try. Facts about how difficult something may be should
bear on how much effort we put into any particular transformation,
but in some cases it's worth it anyway. Any given evo psych story
might be wrong, and one way to test it is to try to change society to
be in line with our modern values.
A clear example is the male tendency
towards violence (on average greater than females). Everyone favors
reducing violence towards others. We teach our children to channel
their angry feelings into nonviolent forms. Evo psych predicts we
have to do this anew for every generation of children, and boys will
struggle with it more, but it is clearly worth it.
But what can evo psych do for you in
your own personal life?
Several models of psychotherapy propose
that our minds have separate components. Freud started it with his
id, ego, and superego. For other examples, <Transactional Analysis>,
while now dated, gave central place to parent, child and adult as
parts of our psyche. More recently, the <Internal Family Systems Model> posits managers, firefighters, exiles, and the self. One way these
approaches help is to separate some dysfunctional feelings and
behavioral tendencies into an identifiable unit, respect it on its
own terms, but strive to let other healthier parts govern your
behavior instead.
Evo psych can be helpful in the same
way. Sometimes we can identify tendencies in ourselves we are not so
proud of as products of evolution, and we could package them up as
components of ourselves. One advantage is that we can forgive
ourselves for having such tendencies and honor them as part of our
human heritage. We can skip trying to find the cause of such
tendencies in our childhood, and not expect to remove them from
ourselves root and branch. We can expect to feel them arise again and
again. Instead, we choose to guide our behavior by the better values
we have chosen.
There are a great many examples, many
concerning sex. Middle-aged men will notice women in their 20s and
feel a very strong attraction -- and sometimes leave their wives for
a younger one. Women may feel strongly drawn to rich, muscled men in
sports cars who treat other people badly. Happily married women may
feel so strongly attracted to some other men they might engage in an
affair. Men may notice a strong desire to have sex with women despite
ambiguous consent. Women might feel a strong pull to not give their
baby up for adoption even though they decided in advance that would
be best for everyone. Men who really only want to have sex when their
partners also really want it may nonetheless notice an ongoing strong
desire to have sex more often.
We can accept any such tendency we
find, recognize it as adaptive in the environment we evolved in,
recognize it as not adaptive today, and then commit ourselves to
living according to the modern values our best selves have adopted.
In the above examples we keep our
evolutionary tendencies in check and refrain from actions our best
selves would regret. But it could also lead to action. Women might
decide that prostitution is a good choice for them, recognizing their
innate tendency to feel bad about that and choosing to set it aside.
There is also the matter of
interpreting other people's bad behavior or tendencies as rooted in
their innate tendencies rather than evil intentions. Middle-aged
women often notice their husbands looking at younger women. They
could interpret it as their still being under the sway of an unjust
patriarchal system or a pathetic attempt to deny that they are
themselves getting older. They could more accurately interpret it as
part of the way all men are wired -- a desire for sex with fertile
women. Accepting the tendency (maybe even joking about it pleasantly)
while expecting the men to stay true to them might be part of more
intimacy in the marriage. Men might feel annoyed that their wives are
not interested in sex anywhere near as often as they are. They are
willing to do anything sexually the woman wants and have made it
clear it would mean a lot to them; what's the problem? They should
understand that women are wired to care deeply about when they have
sex in a way that goes beyond rational considerations.
There is a misguided feminist attitude
that takes this tendency to care deeply about the exact circumstances
of sexual encounters and sets it up as an object of worship. <This article> takes the extraordinary position that if a man makes clear he wants
any relationship to be a sexual one (a common enough position) and a
woman goes along but later regrets it, she was coerced and possibly
raped. The standard assumption of most monogamous couples is that
neither will seek sex outside, but that they will have sex inside the
relationship with reasonable frequency. Affirmative consent means
that a man should always respect a woman's desires. However, if the
woman is hardly ever interested in sex, that seems an entirely
appropriate justification for him leaving the relationship in search
of one that meets the standard. Throughout history couples have
compromised in frequency of sexual relations. This feminist attitude
seems to be that women should never compromise, and that any men who
do not accept this new reality are, well, sexists. A likely result is
a lot more men refusing to be in such relationships at all. What the
analysis ignores is that most men are just wired to want sex a lot,
and finding ways to accommodate that desire pretty often (though not
on demand, of course) is part of compromising to make a relationship
work. Thinking the man's desire for frequent sex is pathological is
not a good starting point.
If a woman is raped, she might think
about the motivation of the man who raped her. Feminist theory would
suggest that he wanted to show his dominance over her, humiliate her,
and hurt her. Evo psych would suggest that a big part of his
motivation, ultimately, was a desire to father a child. There is
absolutely no excuse for his action, but would a different
perspective on his motivation make it easier to heal? It might be
worth considering. Maybe the answer is a resounding "no",
but it's for each person to decide on their own.
A lot of the evo psych tendencies I
have discussed are differences between the sexes. Sex is like no
other division between people. Women have sons and men have
daughters, and we are intimately intertwined. Evo psych predicts
differences in behavior between the sexes because of differing
strategies for reproductive success. We see a great deal of it in the
animal world, and evo psych has a good story to tell about many human
differences as well.
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