Nick Clegg's conference speech yesterday contained some remarkable lines, but few more so than these:
My basic view of human nature is that people are born with goodness in them.
Of course, people can be selfish, cruel or violent -
But I believe no-one starts that way.
The trouble is, intrinsic human nature is not solely a question of ones subjective 'basic view' or belief. Apparently Clegg isn't familiar with any of the scholarship on human nature since Jean-Jacques Rousseau put forth a similarly optimistic view of the noble savage. Like Clegg, Rousseau explained all of man's cruelties and selfishness in terms of socialisation and flaws in society smothering that innate goodness. Human nature was emphatically not to blame.
But evolutionary scientists above all - George Williams, William Hamilton, Edmund Wilson, Robert Trivers, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby - have made groundbreaking advances in recent decades to establish what are the basic and not so basic scientific facts about human nature, and these are not at all kind to Clegg's remarkably rosy view.
Harvard's Stephen Pinker is perhaps the best known populariser of this new understanding, his work The Blank Slate an epic assault on the notion that human nature is infinitely plastic, and can be whatever we as a society choose to make of it. Pinker's chapters examining political philosophical perspectives use evolutionary psychology to show how much closer to the mark is the conservative and Hobbesian view of human nature than the Rousseau and apparently Cleggian view. Yes, most people aren't cruel in most circumstances - but that appears to be a product of rational calculation about the risks, rewards and penalties, of socialisation and of a sense of kinship with a limited number of others that cannot plausibly be extended to all of humanity. Ignoring evolutionary science and suggesting that all "people are born with goodness in them" but not an instinct towards selfishness, cruelty or violence is just as much creationism as denying man's common ancestry with apes.
What's to bet I am the only person to point this out? It may seem a relatively trivial point that Clegg is unfamiliar with relatively recent scholarship on evolution, but plenty of people went after John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin for less. Some commentators actually said her willingness to support Creationism being taught alongside evolution was enough to make them doubt voting for her. Fine, if that one issue really matters so much to them, but let's see some consistency. Clegg's creationism is scarcely any better informed, and it has policy consequences far more dramatic than a few debates in science lessons.
If you mistakenly believe nobody is instrinsically inclined towards cruelty and violence, your view about how much protection to offer the public from criminals who have been violent and cruel will also be extremely misinformed - hence, I suppose, the Lib Dems' refusal to accept all the empirical evidence about the positive effects of prison in reducing crime. If you think all of the badness in humanity is explained by society, the market economy, social conditions and so on, you'll be inordinately inclined towards massive constitutional and social reform - seen at its most extreme in the horrors of the French Revolution that Rousseau did so much to inspire (Robespierre supposedly carried copies of Rousseau's books with him at all times). If you deny that human selfishness - which evolutionary biologists explain as a willingness to help not just oneself but also those closest to oneself genetically, like children - is an intrinsic part of human motivations, then you'll struggle to understand why fiscal incentives, market signals and marginal tax rates are so important.
Few of Britain's politicians and journalists - Daniel Finkelstein is one exception - have much to say about how much scientific and academic developments are gradually confirming the conservative view of human nature and of society as emphatically as our modern understanding of economics refutes Marxism. But it does and will matter, and Nick Clegg yesterday showed how much reading he has to do.
